Water effects good and bad

An oasis in the painting table awaits...

This resin piece is done by Fernvalescenics who I came across at Cancon a few years ago.  It's nice and simple and was quite cheap at around $8 from memory.  I aimed to do a simple paint job add texture and also wanted to try water effects. 

At that time there was no game store near me so I ended up looking in Hobbyco in the railway scenic section and online to see what other people did.  Hobbyco had the Ziterdes “Water-Drops (colour)” set for sale and it seemed like quite a good product.  Seemed.  The key point on this approach is that you have to melt the plastic beads (clear and coloured) in the oven, then pour.  After 40mins your kitchen smells really bad and you have a pourable molten plastic mix.  So you have to be very careful on what you are pouring into for warping due to heat and melting of paint, etc.  The end result is quite nice and since it can be coloured (something most other water effects can't) I thought this was a winner.  However in Australia it gets quite warm, and the plastic used doesn't set or ever fully harden.  Really it is more a semi cooled plastic with a low melting point.  Ie it can be reused just by heating it up again.  So in a 40 degree day the entire piece gets quite tacky.  I left another piece of terrain on top of my oasis and now I have a nice bit crease mark across the pond.  Bit of fail whale there.  I also did a small test river section on a terrain board and left the board propped up against a wall.  The next day half the river had slid down the board!  Time for a different approach for terrain board rivers.

The head waters

Another product I had seen mentioned was called liquid glass (and other similar brand names).  It is a two part resin that is mixed at room temperature and self levels.  It is made as a replacement for multiple poly coats put on wood, etc.  Unable to find any in hardware stores I found the Liquid Gloss brand in Eckersley’s art store here in Sydney.  It can be coloured with inks during the mixing process.  It takes a day to harden and seven days to be fully cured.  After that it's rock hard and can even have hot items placed on it without marking the surface.  You do have to mix the product very well (5 minutes of constant stirring) but any air bubbles can be blown out with a propane/butane torch.  Just be careful as all those popping air bubbles does make the flame flare up briefly.

Before I did any river pieces I did a number of small trial runs to work out the drying time.  I also wanted to sculpt the surface to create a ripple effect for the river pieces.  Dead flat water isn't natural, so a gentle ripple of the entire river catches the light and makes the piece look much more realistic.  At around 22 degrees Celsius the ideal time to sculpt was approx 2.5 hours after pouring.  Wetting my finger so it wouldn't stick I would depress the resin and it would hold the shape.  But the resin would still try and self level, so any depression would be a quarter the size after a few minutes.  So I would have to repeat the procedure a number of times over an hour or so.  If left too long before sculpting the depressions wouldn't hold to the level I wanted.  Also too much water would give the surface a milky and rough looking finish.  This is why it's best to do some trial runs first.  Better to ruin a few small batches then an entire river board. 

With respect to colouring the resin I found Citadel inks worked well.  The resin had the same ink mixing properties as a similar volume of water so I could use water to work out how much ink was needed to get the colour I wanted.  In all cases it was much less than I first thought.  My first experiment used a single drop of blue ink which resulted in the darkest blue water ever seen.  Rather than using a pipette dropper I ending up using a small brush and smearing a small amount of ink in the mixing pot.

In the end I had a solution for water effects that was reasonably priced, sturdy and repeatable in behaviour.  Next steps would be making terrain board tiles with recessed rivers.

Rippling river action