Durins Causeway continued...

Happy Birthday Mrs Queen, thanks for the long holiday weekend! The long weekend here has seen more terrain modelling work on Durins Causeway, and the Watcher Board.

I have skim coated the whole structure of the causeway, in polyfilla, and then built up the rocky areas using off cut chunks of white poly, (left over from the pirate isle build) and expanding foam filler (Sika Boom)...

I also sourced some bright yellow LEDs to have a go at making some flame effects with water effects resin, for the gullies in the base... but that will wait for next weekend, probably...

So here's the causeway done up to this point...

The left side wall panel, with 'shooting gallery' for goblins... pillars still to be constructed...

More expanding foam filler added... to side wall...

...and main board...

The foam filler will then be carved up with a box cutter knife into a more rock like appearance,  getting rid of the unnatural ballooning circular whirls... this will then be skin coated in filler again, and finally painted with sand textured paint...

The only thing I am pondering now is, I started this build going off the game base dimensions quoted in the scenario; a 24" x 36" board. Then I decided to add the side wall... The only problem is, when I now add this side wall to the board, for the rocky wall with goblins shooting gallery... it looks VERY close to the causeway... compared to movie images... whether its just a case of, well get used to it, that's how I've made it... OR... expand the width of the board, moving the side wall further away and adding an extra piece of base board and back rock wall section to join it all up??? I'm going to have to ponder this... I cant make it too far away, or the goblin bows will be out of range!

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Back to the Watcher board, and I have had great success with the 'Envirotex Lite' epoxy... for the water area. I made three successive pourings and each dried easily and clear within about 5 hours. I used a translucent dye (Olive Brown) in the mix to darken the colour of the water. Once this was dry I went over the top surface with 'Liquitex Gloss Gel Medium', and used a stippling effect with end of a make-up blusher brush - a spare one rescued from wifeypoos stash - she wont notice one went missing surely??? ;-)  This has dried well and I am very happy with the result.

I am just putting finishing touches to the stream and water fall, should be able to put finished pics up Monday or Tuesday... and then finally get to play the Watcher in the Water scenario... its been a long wait!

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To finish off the weekend, Chris and I had a game, continuing on from the last battle game we had that featured on his blog, the rescue the artifact one... the gist of this game was 350pts of woodelves led by a weakened Legolas, fleeing through Mirkwood, but having evaded their pursuit from the battlefield, are then ambushed by beast in the woods; wargs, spiders and bats... It was a quick and brutal little game, which Chris might write up for his blog, so I wont spoil the read by giving the result here!

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As a final touch for the weekend, having completed the Hobbit dwarfs, and little weapon stash yesterday, I couldn't help but break open the Trolls; Bert, Tom and Bill and got them assembled today... great models, cant wait to paint them up!

Busy busy as always... till next time...

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PS - forgot to mention this before but Ste is having a give away , check out his excellent blog here:
http://offtclub.blogspot.co.nz/2014/05/as-promised-competition-time.html

PPS - After the switch to Google+ comments trial - I wasn't happy that it still wasn't giving me an email feed of comments (couldn't find any setting to tweak to change this), nor was it logging any comments as a number at the bottom of the post on screen, plus the comments pane within blogger 'desktop' had disappeared ... so I switched back to routine Blogger Comments... If you have left a comment under Google+ comments, it may well have now disappeared... Thanks for putting up with the disturbance to service here!

UPDATE - 6/6/14 - Just noticed, since the side panel had not been attached to anything, as the glued on foam blocks and expanding foam has dried the wall piece has warped in over ... stupid mistake to make... so That kinda forces my hand - I'll widen the board and glue extra mdf sheet with reinforcing strips to counter the warping of the side panel.... I am actually now thinking of adding a piece behind the top door of main panel, a flight of stairs down to it... this would allow a join up with Dwarrowdelf section and Balins tomb... modelling megalomania - my mind knows no bounds - or sanity!? ;-)