Left handed river sections

 Like reconnaissance, I've generally found that time spent on terrain is rarely wasted. 

Regular readers will have noted that I have some wavy river sections which have featured in many games. Although they can be used on conventional game mats as is, the 'waves' are carefully measured to confirm to Hexon terrain sides so I have the option to run them along hex sides as well as through them.

They are in a variety of configurations with varying numbers of faces (2, 3 and 5), but these have three faces and I tend to use them a lot as they are neither too short nor too long. 

They are what I term 'right handed' and for some reason  I originally made up nearly all the first batch up in this configuration. 

I realised fairly quickly that having all the three face sections with the same orientation meant they wouldn't tesselate properly for some hex side configurations, so I wanted to make up some more in the "left handed" ones (like the one on the left above) . 

They are made out of clear plastic, from roller blind holders. This is usually a fairly sturdy plastic, but not brittle and thin enough to cut easily. 

I just ran a 0.2mm lining pen around the existing one to get the template. 

A quick run of the pen and a bit of scissoring and four new section outlines. Just need to cut them out now. 

After cutting them out, the messy job is adding is adding the 'river banks'. All my river sections of various widths and materials have banks, it helps define the boundaries and just looks better. 

I just ran PVA along the edges and gave them a good coating of static grass. Oddly this even looks OK for desert wadis, we are used to seeing lots of vegetation at the edges of waterways. 

I use clear plastic so some of base cloth/hex colour shows through, they just look much better that way. In their raw state they are too transparent though, so the next job is to make them a bit more opaque. 

The backing colour on some of my originals is far too 'blue', the better sections are more greenish. Real streams are often greenish or brownish so I roughly scraped some "Forest Green" craft paint along the underside in an approximation of weeds or whatever in the direction of flow. Originally I used some paint from household emulsion match pots but that is long gone. 

They still look a bit rubbish against a white background. Mm, I think this picture must be upside down as they've all suddenly become right handed again! But you get the idea. Ah, I've just realised that the three sections on the right are inverted, it is easy tell face-face but less easy in a photo.

But put them on a mat and suddenly it all works as the backing colour shows through . The rough stripes of darker paint give it some depth, rather like my trench sections where I've painted the trench bottoms a dark colour. 

And on the Hexon they can run through the hexes or along the sides, depending what I'm doing. Yes, the flock I used on the river banks is that same as the Hexon tile grass flock (Noch static grass, I can't recall the exact shade). 

I'm glad I finally got around to doing that, it will avoid some long standing frustrations on the odd occasion I need complex river setups on the Hexon.