Painting A RiverBed

ac4400fan · December 9, 2005, 10:52pm

Hi Guys just a question, next week i think im going to be ready for water in sleep river i know you have to paint the bottum 1st any special colors sand ect ?
Much help thanks

Carl…

Anonymous · December 10, 2005, 8:57am

Never done it but I would think that you want to start with the basic rock colour, then any plants (unless water is flowing too fast)… then, if it’s deep water, anything in it… rocks, trees, trash… I would think that plants fall into two groups… things like reeds that will stick up from the bottom into the air and things that stay under water… these might be on the bottom and (kind of) half way… so I would experiment with pouring some water to part depth, letting it dry, then painting the colour of these plants, letting it dry and then pouring more water.

The question I don’t know an answer to is getting ripples over or round rocks… added to which some plants bend with the flow… whoever manages these should get a really good looking river.

I’d definitely carry out some experiments first.

While you can see the sand of a sandy bottom in full size the grains are tiny so by the time your scale it down I think that you will just see the colour. Rocks and strata will show though.

Good luck and let us know how you get on please.

Have fun.

RMax1 · December 10, 2005, 9:03am

I started out with black water color paint and lightened it with blues and greens towards the edges. The sides of the river banks were the same color as most of the layout ground. Mixed a lit tle rock and some plants close to the edge. after that I used the Woodland Scenics Realistic Water and poured in layers.

RMax1

ARTHILL · December 10, 2005, 9:26am

Sassi’s scenery book gives great suggestions with pics. I won’t know how it works for a while though.

nbrodar · December 10, 2005, 11:35am

While this is more of a pond, here’s what I did:

I used Delta Creamcoat craft paints. The brown is Territorial Beige, and the blue/black is Prusssian Blue. Working quickly and with a couple brushes, I painted on the beige, then the blue, and blended the two together. Sometimes, mixing the two on my palette, and sometimes mixing on the pind bottom.

Nick

ukguy · December 10, 2005, 1:14pm

An old post of mine on this subject :-

QUOTE: As for the water after much reading (you can never gather too much info/advice on a subject before you start the project (IMO) I first placed my trestle and chalked where the river needed to flow

then I routed out the MDF (wow that was messy) 1/4" deep

then painted the edges (1/3 of width) of the rive base with a colour slightly darker than the talus I was going to use. Then I painted the center of the river bed black(remaining center 1/3), I only blended this slightly at this point, and let it dry. 30 mins later I went back with a soft 1" brush, wet it in clean water and blended away, I found this method of blending gave a smother transition rather than trying to blend the two wet colours directly after painting. I then sealed the riverbed with hi-gloss poly, added the talus, rocks, weeds and poured the epoxy.(all with drying time in between obviously)

worked out quite well I think .

the ripples in the upper part of the river/stream were created with clear silicon caulk around the rocks, then poured the epoxy, then when dried ‘painted’ on modgepodge (available Walmart craft section) thickly to give running water effect.