My new track coming to life

[JanW]

9 hours ago, cteno4 said:

btw clear silicone us a good one for rushing water on a slope as you can sort of sculpt it as you put it on. thick pva glue can also work but doesnt work well on sharp angles and needs thin repeated coats.

 

cheers

 

jeff

That is a great idea Jeff! Do you mean the clear silicone kit used to seal e.g. the kitchen sink against the wall tiles, i.e. the stuff that cures into a sort of clear rubbery stuff? 
Do you have experience with clear epoxy resin? 

Jan

[EH500 (12)]

Great progress!

[cteno4]

Jan,

 

yep that’s the stuff. Experiment with it as you can get a lot of interesting effects with it. As it dries you can tease it around and get it to get more milky like foam and spray, I think it gets air bubbles in it that cause this while curing. I even made jelly fish tentacles with it over monofilament line for an exhibit once (bells were silicon breast implants of all things...). I experimented with it to make beach waves once to see what it could do and it was a bit messy to work with on that. Layers of thick pva glue seemed easier to work with then maybe accent with the silicone for the last bits. But beach waves get a lot of painting as rarely very clear at all. Stream may need to be clearer depending on how active.

 

done a lot of epoxy resin to embed items and cover things like hatch cover tables. Problem with epoxy is that it will only work well for level surfaces as even though thick it will want to sink to level. You might be able to mix it hot (ie extra activator) and try thin coats on an angled stream but being hot it may go off on you at the wrong time. Hot epoxy can also crack as it can get hot from the reaction while curing. It’s also pretty messy stuff to work with in general. I’ve seen descriptions of using acrylic gel (very thick clear acrylic) to sculpt rapids in layers, followed by lots of dry brushing of blues and greens and whites that looked nice. I’ve experiments with some different things like pva, silicone, acrylic, the scenery waters (melting plastic beads and I think just acrylic medium) and decided that water is something to wait until I had a lot of time to try to tackle on any scale! It boarders on the real art side for me (I’m horrid at painting pictures) so a challenge to do well! But I’ve seen awesome stuff from folks first time out attempting. Experiment a lot before you dive in!

 

faking water is a real artform. It’s also hard as our mind’s eye is full of visual memory of it very close up and it’s pretty clear and very far away where lighting can make it take on all sorts of very solid colors. Then on models we are viewing at intermediate ranges usually of a few hundred feet which can in real life have a wide variety of looks. So it’s a bit of a visual fight going on in our heads on the perception. But little needs to be clear if you are viewing from 1-3’ back as at those distances you really don’t get any clear in most all natural water situations. It’s finding the little detail bits in your scene’s situation that work well to just say WATER in that situation. It’s also something that may vary from viewer to viewer as it is so filled in with mind’s eye visual memories of the viewer.

 

cheers

 

jeff

[nscalestation]

Quote

On 4/30/2018 at 12:47 PM, JanW said:

The small stream still needs to get 'water'. I need to research how to get the water realistically on the slope. 

 

Great looking layout !     Here are some links to some posts I made on my blog showing the techniques I used for water on my Japanese Ntrak module.

http://tokyo-in-nscale.blogspot.com/2014/08/adding-water-to-river-scene.html

http://tokyo-in-nscale.blogspot.com/2015/06/adding-water-feature.html

[JanW]

On 5/4/2018 at 2:39 AM, nscalestation said:

 

Great looking layout !     Here are some links to some posts I made on my blog showing the techniques I used for water on my Japanese Ntrak module.

http://tokyo-in-nscale.blogspot.com/2014/08/adding-water-to-river-scene.html

http://tokyo-in-nscale.blogspot.com/2015/06/adding-water-feature.html

Thanks a lot Brad, very helpful indeed!

I have started to try silicone kit. I ran immediately into trouble because i did not realise that I had to fix the loose stones en pebbles on the river bed first.  So I managed to remove the kit and went on to apply clear high gloss acrylic varnish (like for varnishing furniture). It looks very much like the stuff you used in your 'adding water to river scene' blog. Indeed it dried clear but as expected it shrunk a lot as all the water in it needs to evaporate to cure the varnish. 

This is the 2nd layer, still wet and not yet clear.

 

I will need to apply the varnish a number of times (maybe 8-10 times) to get the right effect. Not sure I want the wild rushing water effect you created with he Woodland Scenics product. Maybe I'll use a little clear silicon kit because I still have some of that and would need to mail order the Woodland Scenics product. 

 

thanks!

Jan

[cteno4]

Excellent blog brad!

 

jeff