I posted some photos of my rivers in the 10/7/12 Weekend Update and really appreciated everyone’s comments about the water I had added to my rivers. I always marvel at the work done by all of you – and it’s hard to describe the feeling when many of you offer compliments on my work. It truly validates that all of the hours I have spent on my layout were hours well spent!
Mike (NARmike) had asked about my technique. It’s really pretty much what most of the scenery manuals describe. Here is a quick run-down on what I did:
1) The river bed is a smooth coat of Hydrocal over foam board. The river bed was painted black.
2) Rocks of varying sizes were glued along the banks at various spots.
3) I don’t use an airbrush, so blending the shore line into the black river bed was a challenge. After researching on the web, I found a technique from someone who details their battle figurines for Dungeons and Dragons-type games. To blend the colors, they will use one paintbrush to paint the color they want to blend into another color on their figurine. While paint is still wet, they will use another brush and will dip it into some of their saliva (yes- this did sound gross to me, too!) and will use that to blend the two colors together. I painted along the shoreline using a color that was similar to the color of the rocks and used the two-brush and saliva technique and it worked very well! I had tried just using a brush dampened with water to blend the colors, but the saliva definitely method worked best. Must be something about the thickness and texture of the saliva that makes this work.
4) Now that I’ve grossed you out, the next step was applying the gloss medium. The first layer was tinted with some dark green acrylic paint (a cheap bottle of acrylic paint from Hobby Lobby). The following layers were untinted.
I used a soft, wide round tip brush (maybe about 1” wide) to apply the gloss medium and used a smaller soft round tip brush along the riverbanks. The gloss medium was applied smoothly and evenly – no ripples yet.
After I had enough layers on to create the depth I wanted, I did the ripples. I had tried Woodland Scenics Water Effects, but did not like the results. What I actually ended up doing was to brush narrow thicker lines of gloss medium across the width of the river – from one bank to the other. I brushed several of these thick narrow lines at a time – keeping maybe about 1/4 to 3/8” distance between each line. I then used a soft round-tipped brush (maybe about 1/2’ in width) to slowly push one line into the next line. Some strokes would just push the gloss medium up to touch the next line; other strokes would push the gloss medium well into the next line. Go slowly and gently with this activity so that you don’t create a lot of air bubbles. If I felt I needed more ripples in any areas, I would just repeat this step again.
How many layers of gloss medium did I apply? I have two rivers and did each a little differently.
The first river had two coats of gloss medium applied, and then I poured a thicker layer of gloss medium on. It all looked great when wet, but when it dried I discovered a number of rambling "valleys" in the river - meandering valleys that were maybe 1/8" deep and ran in no particular direction (parallel to the banks, perpendicular to the banks, or just a curved wandering path). The general consensus on the forum was that you don’t pour gloss medium because it is not designed for pouring thicker layers and it hardens (dries) by evaporation of its solvent (mostly water), so it will shrink as it dries. It took a look of work and ingenuity to get these valleys filled in. The solution was to use some Aircraft Canopy glue in these valleys – this glue has a fairly thick consistency out of the bottle and dries clear. Once I had the water surface fairly smooth, I then applied a few more layers of gloss medium with the final layer being used to create the ripples as described above.
The second river had all of its layers of gloss medium brushed on (to avoid the “valleys” from my pouring attempt on the first river.) At this time, there are about 6 layers of gloss medium applied. I do not think that the river appears as deep as the other one, so I will probably apply several more layers of gloss medium to it. A slow process – but it gives me something to do each night for a while! This is a photo of the second river:
I hope this helps explain my technique.
Thanks,
Bart
