Micro-Terraforming: 1/3rd Complete

Above is the "before picture."  (Click on the images throughout this post to enlarge).

This is the micro-scale (1/285th, 6mm, 1/300th) terrain board I bought from my friend Adrian several months ago (see "Shipyard," 31 Dec 09 post).  It's a river valley set during an early/late winter, depicting a landscape speckled with snow and mud. 

In order to make the board more versatile, I made several changes.  Starting with the two end panels (seen at the bottom of the above photo), I uprooted all the individual, frosted pine trees on the valley floor and applied two coats of spray paint to the hill (flat white) and the valley floor (flat dark green).  I decided to give the river a glistening look, so I repainted it using gloss blue with some dashes of glossy dark green. 

Then I slathered on Elmer's Glue and doused the hill with Soft Flake Snow from Woodland Scenics, and did the same for the valley floor, using Woodland Scenics's Burnt Grass/Fine Turf.  Since I have modern road sections, I decided to keep the board's road network unpaved.  After I repainted the roads flat brown, I applied fine basing grit from Gale Force Nine.

The end result, for my initial two panels, is the entrance of an "alpine valley:"

I kept the valley floor bare of other features so I could add, remove, or change the type and location of the terrain, depending on what gaming scenario was being played:

While I couldn't change the course of the river, I felt I could still modify it to suit different scenarios.  Strips of tan felt, purchased at Jo-Ann's Fabric, are used in the photo below to create a dry river bed:

While strips of white felt are used to create a frozen river:

(But is it safe for troops to cross? Order the penal troops to advance!)

And if I don't need a river at all, then some strips from an old army blanket does the trick at filling in all that deep blue.  (I must admit, I need more practice at cutting and trimming lengths of cloth).  The gap in the road is filled-in using a piece of latex dirt road I purchased from Monday Knight Productions:

Oh, and the black curtain is part of a studio lighting and back drop kit my wife gave me for Christmas, that I finally got around to using!

Okay, that's two panels done, four more to go...