Materials Sand, Over View

DyeHard's Wargame Terrain

Sand

Wild Sand
Builder's Sand
Desert Sand
Decomposed Granite
Super Sweet
White Sand
All-Purpuse Sand
Base Rock
Aquatic Soil
Play Sand
Soil Buster
Washed Sand

Sand can be obtained from many different sources. The four piles above were obtained from two such sources. Across the top you will see builders sand I recovered from on top of an old furnace I removed from a house I was remodeling. The left side is courser and the right hand pile the finer fraction as separated by sifting through a kitchen style screen strainer. The lower group is shifted as well, but this was the "soil" of my home region, a desert. The scooped this out of a cut in a construction site. In my promotion of the use of coffee as model soil, I am often asked why I do not simply use dirt from the yard. Well here is your answer. Not all dirt will make a good model for rich soil. Coffee will pass much better then the sand above. Notice the very different appearance of the course and fine fraction of the local sand. I often fined the different fraction of shifting look very different.

To texture the washer, I have coated it with an adhesive (PVA, Matt Media, Latex Paint, or specialty Base Paste, can be used). Once well coated I pour a small mound of very fine sand I collected from a local inland sand dune. High winds and low rainfall make these a common feature in my area. The wind blown sand and left over volcanic ash form an almost concrete like mixture. This I use to represent soil.

Now let us move on to finishing the texturing of the base. My philosophy is to create multiple layers of texture and color to simulate the soil and plant litter of the jungle floor. As many jungle are also frequented by heavy rain fall, often running water strips away the soil leaving exposed the typically poor sub soil. To model this I start with patches of sand. Using some slightly watered down white glue (PVA) with a drop of wetting agent added (dish soap) I make random patches across the base. The base is then covered in a layer of builder's sand. This is much courser then that used to originally coat the base. The latest addition is allowed to dry and the excess poured off.

The difference between the textures of the two sands being used are clear from this photo. The builder's sand looking like small stones on top of the fine wind blown sand looking like soil.

Washed Sand

A trip through the garden department of my local Fred Meyer's (a combination department store, grocery store in the USA) in search of vermiculite for my Perma-Scene project, I came across some other useful items. One was this "Washed Sand".