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I was thinking of making some Khemri quicksand terrain. I was wondering how to make a realistic sand effect - I could just glue down sand but figured that the scale would look wrong. Would it work if I then painted it a sand colour? Any thoughts?

Fine sand will look, er, fine The problem is how to make it look like quicksand rather than just another patch of sand.

Hmm, maybe if you use gritty sand and fine gravel and desert vegetation for your other terrain, then this one patch of perfectly smooth flat sand can look suspicious...

Use very fine sand and paint it. The important part is to keep the grains as small as possible so that you have a mostly-flat surface with just a hint of texture, not distinct individual grains. And try to add some variation (ripples, footprints, etc) to make it clear that it's sand on the base, not a hard surface like a floor or stone. It's not going to be perfectly to-scale (otherwise you'd never see the sand texture at all), but most effects have to be exaggerated a bit to be visible at 28mm scale.

Very fine sand such as bird sand from pet stores, or Typhus Corrosion used as a texture.
Be very careful in application as caking it on errant areas such as the foot of the model can blow the effect very easily.

you could try super glue and baking soda.

Polyfilla (spackle) works well for very, very fine sand / mud.

When painting sand on larger areas (anything above 25mm bases) you'll want to vary the base tone - I use weathered wood (a light brown colour) then throw on some random patches of wash with sepia and darker browns before drybrushing back up. For finer sand, you need to use a much dryer brush and lighter touch or it'll streak and look wrong. It's almost impossible to undo streaking at this stage, so 'less is more' is the adage. You can always do more passes with a gentler touch.

For Khemri Quciksand terrain, just do normal sand... with a hand reaching up out of it. Some ripples around it to mark it as recent, maybe some footprints... and you're done.

If you are looking to get REALLY fine sand. look into finer grit blast media.

you can get some very VERY fine stuff.

Also glass bead media and other interesting shapes and textures.