Making ripples

While the river and stream have depth and look shiny, I'm not sure the effect is quite what is needed. A little while back Tom Dauben suggested I add ripples using a thicker gloss gel, hence I got a tub of Liquitex Gloss Super Heavy Gel. Once again, out came the test pieces for the river for experimentation. The base river uses gloss Modge Podge with a brown tint as described previously. 

The gel was stippled on with a small brush, giving small surface undulations and enabling the gel to be worked up to the banks and around stones. Doesn't quite look like water though. 

I then used my airbrush - without paint - to blow the wet gel. I found about 30 psi pushed the gel into little wavelets which had direction. This looked much better than just stippling, though probably the wavelets are a bit high. 

I'd noticed on Loctern Quay that the gloss Modge Podge does gradually lose it's shininess, becoming a little dull. In my test pieces, the Delux Materials Aqua Magic hadn't gone far with a tendency to thin when drying, but it was noticeably more shiny than the Modge Podge, with no sign of dulling - astonishingly it's been 2 years since I first did these tests! So I decided to try a layer of Aqua Magic over the Modge Podge. The left-hand river here has Aqua Magic over smooth Modge Podge over the lower 25%, and over the stippled and blown gel covering the upper 25%. I also tried a deeper layer of the gel on the right hand river.

Here's the results. The deeper gel (lower right in the above picture, top right in the below picture) didn't dry clear, showing it can only be used in thin layers (as expected). The stippled and blown gel does look quite effective. The addition of the Aqua Magic (at either end of the upper / left hand river) definitely makes the surface look shinier and more wet, and over the textured gel it helps smooth and level the surface a little while leaving plenty of texture. I think this combination works well, there may be better ways of achieving wet looking ripples but this looks effective without a lot of effort. 

Just need to repeat over the several feet of stream/river on the layout now.