Violinist diorama base work part 3

Well it was a bit of shocker at work this week.  Half the team no longer there and some big questions on what is going to occur in the future.  Makes it very hard to concentrate on painting which is a bit unfortunate.

Most of this week was thinking about the water pond and trying to get a marble like effect.

Water pond underway

For the pond I sculpted the Milliput into a gentle curve around the edge of the pond.  This was then sanded down and then painted in PVA glue to seal it up.  However the PVA glue made the Vallejo undercoat I normally use crackle.  In the end I used some household ‘4 in 1’ prep paint which went on smooth.  I originally painted the pond a earth colour as per the picture but have since decided that a lighter blue with a pattern on it will look better.  Think tile mosaic.  I’ll still have some rubbish in the water I think but this way the pond is more a decorative garden pond gone to waste instead of a rough pond.

Water, but no tap??

I purchased some Vallejo Water Effects to use to make the fountain spout water.  This is a very thick gel that dries clear.  Using a piece of fishing line as the core a number of coats of the gel is applied to get a life like steam of water.  I’ve very happy with the test piece and the product.  Still very disappointed with the Vallejo Still Water which is useless.

Begging bowl, coins unpainted

I needed a begging bowl for my violinist so used one I had purchase as part of a pack of 54mm diorama extras.  I used VMC Tan Yellow as the base as I wanted the bowl to look like an earthen ware.  I added a few coins to the bottom by slicing off some 1.0mm styrene rod very finely and glueing them to the bowl.  These were then painted silver.

Marble trial

I’ve also been trying to do marbling this week.  However I haven’t had much success.  I’ve been doing the ‘thin paint, then add water drops’ method to get the darker colour lines like you seen on marble.  That hasn’t been really working as well as I wanted.  I started using some Winsor and Newton flow improver (alcohol ethoxylate) which breaks the surface tension dramatically.  Very much like putting a drop of detergent in a pool of greasy water.  This helped no end.  Of course too much and the paint all separates.  In the trial piece that was working ok, but not quite what I wanted.

Since then I’ve tried the other method which is directly painting the marble lines.  Again I used the flow improver to make the paint as smooth and thin as possible.  You don’t want to see the paint lines really, rather just the suggestion of a different colour.  I think this second method is working better but need to do some more work.