I just did the first of two planned pours of a creek using Envirotex and was looking over the results so far. I think my creek bed painting turned out to be a little too much of a blue/green color.
I was thinking about how to tone the color down or muddy it up a little. My thoughts were to maybe add a little tint color to the second pour but I’m not sure what color to use. A drop of light brown? Olive? Black?
Second option might be to add a very thin washed out paint color on the first layer after it sets, before pouring the second Envirotex. Again, what color?
Third option would be to leave it alone as I might get it all screwed up if either above option is tried.
Head off to the LHS and get some of those little clear plastic measuring cups, 50 for about $2.
Color is a tricky business, and tinting Envirotex a matter of near microscopic quantities of tinting agent.
On a white sheet of paper, set up a grid of cups, preferably on your layout to use the exact same lighting. In the bottom of each cup, duplicate your existing E’tex pour, in color and depth.
Now experiment, to see how to save the existing pour.
You only have so much depth for additional pours. If you get it wrong, not only do you have to tear out the existing pour, you will also probably have to re-craft the whole water area base, from plaster cloth on up.
I learned this the hard way when my E’tex formed a sea of tiny bubbles on the lakebed floor over a snady surface.
Tinting went smooth, because I used the clear cups and tiny drops of tint on a toothpick to get the color right first.
You MIGHT save the existing pour by sheer luck, picking the mitigating tint to make it look right out of millions of possibilities, but you are more likely to make it worse without testing first.
I think you can save what you’ve aready done, and I think green, yellow or both will probably get you there, but I’d definitely test the theory out first, that looks like an area you have MANY hours invested into already. No sense taking a chance on ripping it all out unnecessarily.
I sure do not want to strip the creek back to the base surface and start over - no way given that there’s over 100" involved not to mention the rocks and bridge abutments that would have to be reworked. The first pour, which was clear, was a full 16oz.
Testing with small cups sounds like a good idea. I could sit the cups directly on top of the creek the way it is now, once it fully cures, so I can see the effect of trying different colors in the tint of the second pour.
I wish I was better at color combinations. My first try would probably be with just a dab of yellow, dark brown or a dark green. If I cannot get a good confidence level during some testing, I’ll leave it the way it is.
Terry, The pictures you posted look great. In my case, I don’t know if I would try to paint the surface of the first pour before adding the second. I don’t think I could do a good job painting around the talus, rocks, and bridge abutments that are already there. (BTW, the abutment in the picture shows white but it is really a light gray). I’ll have to give this some more serious thought. Thanks.
Yellow on what you have now will try to make the blue go green.
Green on what you have now will shift the blue green towards a greener green.
A potential problem will be two very visibly different layer colors. In testing I’d like to see what happened with a relatively darker green but not so much dye, so you have some opacity but not totally opaque. Atop that, a thinner mix of yellow-green might make what you have now a deep greenish with a hint of blue, and look like a REAL deep river.
Another suggestion would be another two layer additional pour, with the sandwich layer being a greener green blue than what’s there now, followed by green only or green-yellow.
Light, color, transparency, opacity, even refractive index all add up to a complex equation. Don’t be afraid to test unusual combinations, all it costs is tint and Envirotex.
For what it’s worth, after much testing here, we used WS meltable water beads. The colors in our LHS’s E’tex variant came out nice, we really liked a real thin algae green tint, but the surface of the stuff would NOT dry smooth, strange unevenness, and it refused to adhere well to a sandy bottom, leading to the sea of bubbles mentioned earlier.
The WS beads have a thin golden tint, and most of the coloration comes from the paint on the river bottom, mixed and blended wet, before ever pouring the “water”.
Jeffers; appreciate the information. I included a small bottle of transparent green and transparent amber dye in an order I was making anyway. I’ll do some testing next week before committing either, or some combination, to the next pour. Thanks again.
