A river, a road, and a learning experience

Another one of my older projects, and this one is especially important to share because there were a few points where it looked like a failure. In the end, it taught me a lot of valuable lessons and still left me with usable terrain pieces.
Am I'm proud of them? No, not really. Can I use them for my games? Yes, of course.

I worked with several new materials and didn't do any research about them beforehand.
I then proceeded to work on the entire thing at the same time, without doing a small test piece first.
Yes, that was reckless and dumb - I'll not be doing it again.

The original goal

I wanted to make a modular river that could cross a 3" table from one side to the other.
The focus was on playability instead of detailed decoration. I wanted miniatures to be able to stand on the terrain without standing completely crooked or falling over.
I also didn't want to spend a ton of time on it as I was eager to continue my Rangers of Shadow Deep campaign, that needed a river for the next scenario.

What I ended up with

A very straight river and a simplistic dirt road.

While I was cutting up the bases for the river, I remembered an old video from TheTerrainTutor about roads. I watched it again and decided to use the same principle, only with water in the middle. As I had a lot of drying time with the river, I decided to make a similar dirt road in the meantime.

In order to add texture, I decided to use a structure paste I got from Amazon. The coarse one for the river bed, and the fine one for the bank. I applied it with a spatula and got the finished texture by "stabbing" at it from the top with a moist silicone brush.
I really like how this structure paste dries, as it isn't brittle in any way and actually remains a bit flexible. The only negative aspect of the finished texture was all the nooks and crannies that were hard to put a decent basecoat of paint on.

I then glued rocks of varying sizes down, painted everything, applied grass and some foliage, and felt pretty good about my progress.
That feeling quickly evaporated after I poured the water effect.

• The liquid reactivated parts of the PVA glue I used and left foggy spots in the water.
• I had several leaks that climbed up the foliage of the river bank and left an uneven pour.
• The liquid shrank way more than the 50% it claimed on the bottle

I had to clean up the bases, reapply flocking and paint, and simply hope that it would look decent at the end. Overall, a frustrating process that could have been avoided if I had done my research and proper planning. Lesson learned.