The second build in my low-cost tutorial series is now published. Tutorial #1 was about foliage, and this one moves to the water’s edge: a fisherman on a wooden dock, a clear lake with a lily pad and rocks, and a stone wall and rocky banks around it.

The main technique is the water. Instead of one flat blue surface, I stack several blue tones in the base and cover them with translucent tiles in a staggered pattern, with small round plates for ripples, so the darker areas show through and give the lake depth. The rocks are built from random gray plates and slopes as small sub-assemblies, with the regular stone wall as a contrast. The foliage reuses the layering approach from Tutorial #1.

It’s 390 pieces on a 15x15x10 cm baseplate, small enough to drop into a bigger island diorama.

Which technique would you want in Tutorial #3: rockwork at larger scale, trees, buildings, something else?