Hey everyone out there in the Warp!

So as most gamers know the terrain in which you play has a serious impact on the game at hand. We all know that many things suffice as terrain from pop cans (not mobile carnifexes) to books for hills, but it hardly compares to playing in a well built and painted set of ruined buildings to just add that extra bit to your game. With that in mind we also all know that there are some players who, by intention or not end up breaking these wonderful pieces down, and consequently there are those others who build new ones and repair old ones. So in hope of helping other get ideas for terrain and hopefully encourage more to build there own, i present a tutorial on how to build a desert pond.

1. Stage one - plan and design - in this step your going to simply draw out a rough floor plan for your given piece of terrain. I enjoy putting it on 9 1/2' by 11' sheets of printer paper then tape it to the piece of wood i shall be using so i can use the paper as a template to cut out.

2. The building begins - here i have the base cut out and I've scored the base with a knife to allow the glue to hold better. Next i took 3/4' pink foam and laid the base on top and cut out the outer rim of the pond that will later hold in our water effect. I used simple white glue to hold the foam in place.3. My next step was to cut out a rock formation from pink foam using a hit wire cutter and then added some larger stones from my backyard. Next you should round the edges of the pond using a hobby knife (careful, as the pink foam dulls the blades quickly). After rounding it I used some drywall mud to fill the larger holes and allowed to dry after which i sanded those parts.
4. Next i went about sanding the base with a mixture of GW Hobby sand and some basalt from another store using white glue. After allowing this to dry thoroughly, i used white glue once again, this time in a watered down mixed, and spread some on top to seal the sand down. Because i make a lot of terrain i went out to my local hardware store and got three 1 gallon paint cans done up for the colors scorched brown, desert yellow, and bleached bone. I used the scorched brown in the middle, desert yellow on the fringes and drybrushed over it all with bleached bone. i painted the rocks with a coat of codex grey from the pot.5. Here I've taken several of the blue paints i own (regal blue, necron abyss foundation, ultramarines blue) and black, and painted progressively darker into the middle to produce the look of getting deeper. I then added static grass in a few places both on the rocks and what was going to be under water. Finally i added some pieces of aquarium plan for some larger foliage. 6. The last step is to add the water effect. This was a process that took some time. I did numerous trial runs in small plastic containers literally recreating what i was going to be doing (gluing down sand, painting it and all). I did this so i could find what looked best once covered and how the water effect reacted to the paint, etc. I learned that you MUST ensure the terrain's glue is completely dried before starting or else air bubbles trapped by the glue will push their through the basing, etc. and ruin the model. Also, pop air bubbles with a tooth pick, if they dry, it can cause cracks in the water effect, also use the toothpick to east the effect into small corner or over the static grass. lastly and most important is THIN LAYERS. if you pour too thickly the effect will dry unevenly and either crack or shrink. In the end i also added a drop of liquid blue food coloring to the water effect to give it a nice color. I think i used 4 layers of the water effect and allowed each layer to dry for at least two full days before applying the next layer. Once dry, you have a very durable, very snazzy looking desert pond with which to fight the unending battles of the universe over.