I left the sand on the test piece to dry overnight and my suspicions were confirmed - it is still very blotchy and uniform in colour...
... so I decided to try painting over the sand as mentioned yesterday. Let's start at the shoreline, and work our way up. I added a bit of dark grey to the blue to get a darker blue to suggest deeper water. As you can see I mixed in the lighter blue bit by bit to try and get a gradient, thus making it lighter (suggesting shallow water) on the beach itself. Now I know the shape of this test piece isn't accurate, but the aim was mainly to test scenery colours and techniques.
Then it was time to paint the sand. As before, starting off with the darker areas below the high tide mark (i.e. where the sand is still wet), and ending with the lighter section. It worked much better than I anticipated, and although it's too overscale, I don't think it's possible to get any material much smoother without loosing too much texture. One thing I might try is to avoid placing too much sand on pathways to suggest sand that is more compressed, or perhaps instead of dappling on the paint everywhere I can put on a slightly thicker layer. That should still give a bit of texture, hopefully enough to suggest that it is sand in any case.
I also started to add a couple layers of PVA to give the impression of water. It'll need a fair few coats I reckon to even begin to resemble water. Whilst I had the test piece in the sun, I couldn't help but dig out the "Tin Turtle" and a few loosely places tufts of Silflor.
It's looking a lot better. I will try some modifications as mentioned above, and I hope that will be enough to make a believable scene!
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