A River Runs Through it -- ALMOST! (III - the Paint Job)

With construction complete on the pair of Logar River boards, it was time for my first attempt at painting the waters of the river itself.  In a way this may not be that important, since the plan is to fill the river with at least three 1/8" deep pours of EnviroTex Lite clear resin, but it still should look good as the "bottom" or at least lower depths of the water.  My plan is to tint the resin itself a bit brownish, so I'm going to attempt to make the painted bottom of the river more greenish, but with some blue as well.

Instead of my standard inexpensive craft paints or affordable large volume custom-mixed gallons from Home Depot or Lowe's, I went with Artists Acrylics from a nearby Aaron Brothers art supply store.  The main reason for this choice is it's what recommended on the "Mother of all Terrain Board building sites" -- at least in my own humble opinion -- over at Clarence Harrison's Quindia Studios.

Since first creating this blog back in the Summer of 2010 I've always featured a link to this incredibly useful site, but here's another one:

QUINDIA STUDIOS ARTICLES - including how to make Terrain Boards

(If you're interested scroll down to the long row of thumbnails second from the bottom of the page and start clicking!)

I went with Liquitex DEEP TURQUOISE blue, RAW UMBER brown, TITANIUM WHITE & MARS BLACK, and  GREEN, BROWN, YELLOW OCHRE, BLACK & WHITE; and Windsor & Newton YELLOW OCHRE, BURNT UMBER red-brown, and PALE UMBER drab beige.

For the "blending" process where you're trying to naturally blend colors together to go from a darker center where the water is DEEP to lighter colors towards the riverbanks on both sides, they worked well...

A couple of F&IW Rangers paddle over in their canoes to try out the water...

Have to admit, I think it turned out pretty nice.  In fact, very nice!

I was quite happy.

For a little while... until I kept looking at the water and thinking how it was just too blue and not enough green.

I've done a lot of Google Image searches for "Afghan Rivers" and for the Kabul and Logar Rivers in particular, and at least South of Kabul -- where the Battle of Charasiab was fought -- they always appear to be more greenish than bluish, at least in photos, be they of the tourist snapshot, professional photographer, military pics, or satellite views.

Still, the above looked pretty awesome, especially for my first time ever mixing and blending various shades of Artists Acrylic into a river, and I was worried about messing with it and ending up with something not as good.  So I let it sit.  Until I realized I wasn't going to be happy until I redid it and colored the water more green.

So it was back to the paint tubes, and then the Art Supply store.  But unfortunately I just couldn't find the kind of drab green I was looking for.  Then I realized I could mix the Yellow Ochre I had with the Black I had, and create some drab green...

I mixed in a touch of blue...

And went to work with the brush...

This brings me up to speed blogging my progress on the Logar River.

I've also made a lot of progress on the single 6'x2' Kabul River board and actually finished framing it today, so I should put up a post on building that board very soon -- for which I used a pair of 1" thick sheets of blue foam in place of a single sheet of 2" blue foam, which made construction of the river much -- MUCH -- easier, and also used 3/4" thick moldings to make the 2" high frames from, which compared to the 1/4" thick moldings I used for these boards, was literally a thousand times easier and faster!