'Water Feature' from PaulSS: Tales of the River Bank

I recently received two packs of the Gale Force 9 rivers so when this bonus round came up I thought it would be a great opportunity to get them ready for my battlefield.

When you get them they are pretty bland, the banks are brown with a dry-brush and the water is very blue with a light blue highlight and then gloss varnished, all in all pretty uninspiring.

I started off by washing the water with successive layers of grey, brown and green to get rid of the 'of course rivers are blue' look. In retrospective I think I could have gone even further with this. 

The next step was to add some texture, the original surface of the water was done in a finish of high gloss varnish, which looked OK but was a bit flat. I went to town adding a couple of layers of Liquitex Gloss Gel to add some texture. I left it all to dry over the weekend making sure it was packed away to keep dust off the Liquitex while it cured.

It was now time to make a start on the banks, the kit is delivered with a couple of packs of static grass, but I wanted more texture than that, so started off by sticking on a few chunks of cork bark, lots of tufts, some Woodland Scenics clump foliage then finally adding small patches of static grass with a Noch puffer bottle.

The final step was to build a small bridge. The main components were scrap balsa for the main joists, coffee stirrers for the planking and 1/8" dowel for the rails. The ramps were made of some scrap polystyrene covered in PVA glue and textured with sand and grit. 

I do like how it came out and I now have about six foot of river and a bridge for my games. Not sure how the points shall work for this though, the river would probably be about one and a half 6" cubes and add another half cube for the bridge, 40pts?

And for those of you whose memory was jogged by the title: