Tabletop terrain - water

(Deutsche Version) The basics of creating your own terrain are quite simple. Construct your model, paint it and add grass or some decorative stuff. Of course you can spend an infinite amount of time for doing this but the basic principle is easy. What I did not try until now was water. The easiest version of water is a simple blue area with a shiny surface. Usually, this does not look that good.

There are several commercial solutions to create nice water which I did not try at all. I used silicone instead, which you can get cheaply, for example at Obi (I used this one from an Obi in Germany). The result looks quite good:

When working with the silicone, you should keep in mind that it dries very fast and sticks to your fingers. Creating a wavy surface is easily achieved, if you want to have a flat surface, this is much harder. Additionally, you should keep in mind that the silicone is not perfectly transparent. Therefore, I would suggest to only use the silicone for a thin layer or the waves effect. If the terrain piece shall also consist of grass, I would highly recommend to applying this before the silicone due to the fact that the small grass pieces stick horribly to the silicone and nearly cannot be removed any more. If you want to create deep water, you can see a test object from me in the next two pictures:

The test object is 1 cm deep. The surface is much flatter but still not a perfect flat surface as you would want to have for a lake. For larger volumes, keep in mind that the silicone does not stick to itself after it has started to dry, this creates white areas which do not look good, as you can see in the pictures.
Compared to the price of other commercial products, the silicone is much cheaper and still looks quite nice.