Sandy Shores - Beached!

Alright, as I mentioned yesterday, I hoped to be able to start the beach by the headshunt trestle today. For once, my plan came to fruition - so here we go! First job as always is to cover the area in clay. Usually I just roll out a large thin slab of clay, but I decided to go for a different approach and tear off individual bits of clay instead. This meant there was more texture variety (there's that phrase again!). These were then smoothed with water to create this:

Once that was done, a metal tool was used to pick out some detail - small ridges of sand and also the scouring of the beach where the tide comes in and out.

Next up I sprinkled some play sand and pressed it in to the foreshore:

And then covered the dunes in PVA and sprinkled a layer of play sand on as per the test piece:

Now for some colour! A gradient from dark blue to light blue was painted just in the same way as the test dunes, and the beach was also painted. Comparing the play sand and the painted section shows a big difference in colour. I may be doing some more experimentation with paints tomorrow to see if I can get a closer match to the golden colour of the sand. The current paint is a little too yellow really.

Oh, and I also said I'd show you all the waiting shelter. It's not fantastic, but I might go over it with some more thin layers of paint soon - just to make the yellow and green stand out a little more. Obviously I'll need to fettle and then paint the roof at some point too.

 So I'll leave you for today with this semi-overall view showing the progress. You might also notice that I've done a little bit of painting in the distance onto the stream that connects the pond to the ocean. Needs a lot more work, and more clay work over there though. All in good time!

Still, it's coming along nicely I feel.