Well of Sorrow and Dreams

So, happy to divert myself from what I was supposed to be doing for any number of other projects, inset about building myself a pool to use for Frostgrave.

And here it is.

I started out rooting around in my boxes of useful bits (which I really need to reduce, as there’s an almost comical amount of old polystyrene and bits of plastic packaging down in the basement now) and found a bit of plastic pipe that I’m fairly certain I scavenged from work when we had a plumber in. It was cut fairly unevenly, so I measured it round and corrected that with a mix of clipping and sanding:

Just like all my terrain, it got a base from the mystery board that I rescued from a skip at work (starting to sense a pattern here):

And then began the process of adding bricks!

I’ve still got a load left over from when I overestimated how many I’d need to gussy up some modern ruins. They’re fairly roughly cut, but I think this variation just adds to the effect. I used tweezers to dip each brick individually in a bowl of glue before applying it to the pipe:

And here it is partway done, checking scale with the nearest mini:

I guess if it was a pool designed for people to drink from it would probably be a lot lower, but I also wanted it to be a piece of blocking terrain, so it’s a bit taller than would perhaps be ‘realistic’ (he says, discussing the logistics of a magic pool in an imaginary magic city). 

Once the outside was done, I considered how to finish the inside. I could have thrown some plaster in there and painted it up like dirt/mud, but in the end decided to brick it that side too:

Et voila:

To hide the remaining visible bits of the pipe, I cut some rough capstones to make a lip:

And that was building complete. When using cork, if you don’t protect it in some way it can easily rip and dent during painting if you drybrush a bit roughly, so I dug out my old faithful cheap superglue from Poundland.

A tube of this did only a tiny proportion of the piece though (usually I’m only using it on single rocks or bricks on bases) so I dig out some mod podge to give it a good coating of to toughen it up.

Then it was into painting, which apparently I didn’t take any WIP pics of. The stones for the same treatment as all of my ruins, while the pool got a dark blue base. I tried flicking white paint onto it from a brushes bristles to try and create the illusion of reflected stars, but that didn’t go well at all so I got a bit more creative (there was some finger painting involved):

For the water, I decided I wanted to try some water effect for the first time. My wife has a resin kit she’s been planning on trying out, but we haven’t yet found any time where the children wouldn’t poke their fingers into it to try it. Then I remembered that I have a pot of yacht varnish (which I’m fairly sure my wife bought during one of the lockdowns as the ship didn’t have what I was actually after) and I figured I’d give that a go, as if it didn’t end up looking like realistic water, that was probably still fine, as I could handwave it as magic! So I poured in a thin layer, and waited:

Now it turns out that my idea of what constitutes a thin layer and what the universe does varies somewhat, and I’d poured it too thick. The top cured fine, but it was still very squishy underneath. Oh well, I though, I’ll wait a little longer. And then I accidentally left it on a surface with a very slight slope:

The wrinkly set in it, but underneath was still very squishy. Turning to google, it turns out that varnish doesn’t just cure with time, but with contact with oxygen. Not a problem, I thought, I’ll pop some pinholes in the surface layer to let some oxygen in, cure the bottom, then cover up anything that looks a bit wonky with further layers of varnish - and with a bit of luck, any pin pricks will just look like bubbles! 

Obviously this didn’t work, and as soon as I put the holes in the surface layer it started ballooning up, and I decided to peel the whole thing out:

Having removed the surface layer and scraped any odd chunks out of the edges, I then left the thin layer that remained to cure:

And it did! Over the course of a couple of weeks I then applied very, very thin layers, until it built up to a level that I was happy with (lower than I’d originally planned, but at this point I didn’t want it to go wrong again) and it looked like this:

Result!

So, what did I learn? Thin layers, mostly. The varnish dried slightly yellow, but I think if I’m painting on thin layers that would probably be fine when making a pool or a river rather than necessarily going out and getting a ‘proper’ water effect…