Ponds and Marshes in Twenty minutes.

[tin shed gamer]

Tonight my son informed me he'd promised to have some marsh/ boggy terrain for his gaming night with his Friends.
No biggie only it's tomorrow night and his in a flap.
So muggings has to bounce to the rescue.
The simplest solution is raid the cupboard for some old CD cases.
Fly at them with a pair of scissors.Not glamorous chunks of cd case flying every where.The splash some neat paint onto a piece of paper dab a washing up sponge over it to mix the colours (also dries the paint faster and stops the paper from warping too much.)
Super glue the chunks of cd case to the paper.(doesn't matter if the paper isn't a 100% dry.) Cut out the shapes.
Quickly dab earth brown around the edge.
Go nuts with grass tufts.
Job done passable ponds/marshes . total cost £4 for a sheet of grass tufts.(Simply because I've got to replace the ones I had in stock.)
Total time taken 21 minutes.
Not spectacular but with a little more time and attention to detail. It should be possible to get some better results.
The positives are that it costs very little to achive low profile water themed terrain (less than 3mm thick.basically a cd case lid and a piece of paper.)and that even a more careful approach isn't going to take more than an hour.

[jamesmanto]

Nice job
Fast frugal and effective.
What's not to like?

[Treebeard]

Money and time invested vs Result ... this is a success.

[DoctorPete]

Gotta love simple and cheap terrain.   

[Sunjester]

They look really neat, especially for something so quick and inexpensive.

[Cypher226]

They're really nice, for such a quick effort!
Looks the part, readily identifiable, cheap and quick - ticks all the boxes really!

[traveller]

Brilliant! I will definately steal this one 

[tin shed gamer]

It's also a really useful way to knock out rice paddies.
Once I've restocked I was planning on  making a couple more with a few different textures and techniques(since I've no chance of getting these back of my son.)
If your intrested I'll add them here.Once I'm done.
Mark.

[marianas_gamer]

Mark,
I am very interested in how you plan to do rice paddies! I need to figure out a way to do a bunch that store easily and do not involve me fleeing into exile over the cost 
Lon

[tin shed gamer]

Lon,
There's a couple of ways . The simplest is just make them in the same way as the marshes.
Only real differences being you paint the backing paper as series of light and dark stripes(graduating the contrast between the two.)
Glue the plastic on top . Then just add the grass tufts in broken/ punctuated line over the top of the lighter zones . Plus all around the edge
You can cut down tuft dimensions by chopping through them on the backing paper. (So you don't need to buy as many tufts )

The other means a thicker base and more work. Which is the method I'll be double checking with a build.

[vodkafan]

Excellent! I will copy this for sure but I also have some larger 1ft squares of high quality clear plastic that I lifted out of a skip many years ago and recently found again....might make a large pond out of one using this method.

[marianas_gamer]

Thanks Mark! I will give it a try.

[fastolfrus]

And environmentally friendly - recycling broken plastic CD cases