Irrigation Ditch Tutorial

This post is a tutorial on how I made the Irrigation Ditches for my Afghan setup. Like all my terrain its designed to be placed ontop of my terrain tiles and I wanted a variety of sections for maximum flexibility. Below are some step by step photos and I've tried to describe it as fully as possible. Dougie
A selection of bases for the ditches, cut from 2mm MDF.

For ease I'll concentrate on 1 section but its the same procedure for all. First off you need to chamfer the base edges with sandpaper to get a nice gradual, smooth, finished look. Don't do the join edges as these need to be square to but up against the other sections.

The core of the terrain is made from polystyrene ceiling tile, cut with a hot wire, get the basic look you want then glue it to the base.

If you want to add some little details now's the time to do it, I've added a small culvert pipe.

The next step is to sort any holes out with a filler, the smooth surface of the MDF will be the water so keep this as clean as possible. When you're happy with this paint the base with a suitable emulsion paint, I've got my favourites but your normal colour with do,when this is still wet sprinkle the surface with fine play sand and leave to dry. You can also add a few rocks if you like, fix them with white glue.

When this is fully dry you need to drybrush the terrain up with lighter shades of your base colour, paint in the water sections, DON'T USE BLUE!!!, and paint your details, in this case the culvert pipe. For the water I've used a dirty brown colour at the edges blended darker towards the centre of the water channel. I also tinted the area of the culvert with green to get an algae look. Be quick about this and blend so you don't get stark contrasts.

Last stage is to add some grass tufts and give the water surface at least 3 good coats of high gloss polyurythane varnish. The finished section.