09 March 2009

Water - the making of..

Now for something really scary - water! I'm venturing out into unfamiliar territory here, but I'll give it a shot. Grimstad is a coastal town, so I wanted to add a lot of the water to place the modules geographically. First I smoothed the surface as much as possible, and painted it all black.

Then I added embankments made of styrofoam and some rock castings to the left.

After the embankment and the rock castings were painted, I glued some small rocks and weeds in place.

The fun begins: The first coat of dark blue paint (Lifecolor UA047) was applied with a brush over the whole area.

Close to the shoreline I painted with a light brown color while the blue paint still was wet, and without cleaning the brush. It was suprisingly easy to blend the colors into each other this way.

I used the same technique at the edge of the section, only this time with black colour to simulate deeper water.

To represent the water, I used artists acrylic "Heavy Gel Medium". This stuff can be bought at most art supply stores and dries completely clear and glossy.

The waves was by "dipping" the brush in the gel in this fashion.

This is how it looked after drying overnight.

And this is how it looks with a little norwegian morning sun shining on it. The "waves" look much better with some direct light shining at them, so I'll point one of my layout's spotlights directly at it.

I like "before and after" shots :) Compare this picture with the first in this post to discover what I did over the last 5-6 weeks. This last picture is shot at a hobby fair in Neumunster, Germany. More pics from this event soon.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Very nice result. :-)

Tore Hjellset said...

Thanks :) I'm quite pleased with it myself. So much so that I'm planning a harbour section as a fourth section of Grimstad.