Here's the one photo I have to hand of a system of river sections I built in 1987. I did this fancy module, thinking it would be good for skirmish or roleplaying games. Obviously the bridge is crying out for Indiana Jones!
That year I had been to the late Peter Gilder's Wargames Holiday Centre with some pals from the local Scimitar wargames club. Peter was one of the pioneers of wargames scenery building (amongst many other things in our hobby) and developed a number of dramatic, no-nonsense techniques. He used to make buildings out of solid blocks of wood with windows and doors just glued onto the outside. And he used to paint bodies of water simply with black spray paint, heavily gloss varnished. I was very taken with this approach and copied it for a river system project when I got home. You can see what I mean in the bottom left hand corner of the image at least.
Not everyone likes this black colouring for water, and many years later I would refine it a bit, but I still think it looks more realistic than the lurid bright blue or turquoise wargames rivers we often see. "What colour is a river?" is a surprisingly complicated question, which I've been studying and will hope to go into properly at some stage. I do plan to build myself a new river system in the next year or two, though like all wargamers I have more projects than actually get completed...
WOW! This is a marvelous piece. The water color and surface disturbances look perfect to my eye.
ReplyDeleteBeautiful work, John. You are a rare talent. I’m avidly keeping up with your new blog, and looking forward to your tutorials. When you post photos, I go to school.
ReplyDeleteHere in the Southern U.S., rivers are brown (the “Muddy Mississippi” for example). They don’t make for very pretty terrain, though.
More fantastic work and agree with you about the colour of water, rivers are rarely blue or green!
ReplyDeleteThanks for your comments, guys. Rivers can look brown or grey or black or blue or green. Mostly what we see in real life or photographs is based on the fact that we are looking from a low angle, whereas the wargamer towers over his table at the equivalent of hundreds or thousands of feet up in the air. So there's one issue: we are supposed to be looking as if from an aircraft, not as if standing on the water's edge.
ReplyDeleteWater itself has very little colour, but if a river is carrying a lot of silt, weed or whatever, we may see that and perceive brown or green. Where water is shallow, what may be seeing is the bed, which again is browns mostly, darkening to near-black as the depth increases. But the main impression of "the colour" of a body of water is what it is *reflecting*, because it is a shiny surface. That is going to be some combination of the greenery on the far bank and, most of all, the sky. Obviously, in summer or all year in sunny places, that is going to be blue. Otherwise it's more of a grey. Now this reflected sky colour isn't the totality of what we see, because the surface of a body of water is more or less rippled. For each individual ripple we are getting large patches of the sky reflection, but in other parts reflection from the banks (mostly greenish) or no reflection, hence patches of very nearly black. If you look at a good painting of a body of water, the artist tries to portray this effect of multiple colours in every ripple. From a distance these multiple colours blend into a uniform colour, bearing in mind that blue and brown combined appear as grey. So the upshot is mostly something like greenish grey with a touch of either blue or brown. If you look at aerial photos I think that's what you will mostly see? Try it on Google Earth. (The sea itself is a slightly different story by the way.) At any rate, when I get around to making some rivers, I will experiment with different colours on this basis and decide what looks nicest/ most realistic.