My layout has two large areas of open water, and the time has come to take a deep breath and do both.
My plan is to use the technique used by DoctorWayne and RioGrande5761: to paint the river bottom in varying shades to depict the lighter shallow areas along the banks and the darker deeper areas of the main channel. I’ll be using several shades of tan-to-green-to-dark-brown acrylic covered by a coupla thick coats of one-coat clear gloss water based polyurethane. I guess the total thickness of the gloss poly might be in the 1/16" range. Nothing like a thick pour. And then topped off with eddys and small waves/whitecaps created with acrylic water effects. Not choppy or stormy, just gently flowing.
My question regards the plywood benchwork top. The deck is B/C plywood that appears to be more in the C range than the B; quite a few checks, cracks, knots, and rills. Should I spend a lot of time and effort to spackle and patch and sand sand sand to remove those? Or will they blend in with the applied surface water effects? Both river areas are in modeled locations where moving water is appropriate.
While my riverbeds are plywood, they all have a coating of Durabond 90 patching plaster, which is worked to create the effect of moving water. I’d guess it to be no more than 1/8" thick.
That “water” is then painted with ordinary latex house paint, and any rough water gets a little bit of white paint, then the whole shebang gets three coats of water-based, high gloss, urethane.
Here’s the basic riverbed of Chippawa Creek, before the flood…
…and likewise for the Maitland River…
Since I use Durabond over aluminum window screen for the basic landforms on the entire layout, and the same paint to colour it prior to adding scenery, there wasn’t much added cost to make the water, other than the urethane.
Thanks. Photos No 2 and No 3 show the look I’m going for. Do you have any views from the timeframe between No 1 and No 2? The reason I’m asking is to find out if the eye can catch the optical illusion of depth from the shaded painted deck before applying the heavy coat of gloss polyurethane.
Plus, I think I’m taking Mike’s suggestion and applying a smooth coat of plaster to the entire river bottom. I’m worried that no matter how many coats of paint, the grain and cracks of the plywood will bleed through.
All of the water scenes were done some time ago, so I don’t recall how long it took to go from bare plywood to glossy water.
The Durabond sets in about 90 minutes, and I would have left it to fully harden for a couple of days. The painting was done with a 2" brush, with both the brown and grey/green applied “wet” so that they could be blended together a bit where the colours meet. That would have been left to dry for a couple of days, and then the white (Pollyscale Reefer White, applied with a 1/2" brush) would have been added to the “faster moving” water.
I’d guess that I may have left it sit for a week or so after that, simply to ensure that adding the clear finish wouldn’t have any adverse effect on the paint.
The clear finish was applied according to the directions on the can, which indicate dry-to-the-touch in one hour, and re-coat after four hours. All three coats were applied the same day. The finish is extremely durable, as it’s a good place to take photos, and many cameras have sat on the water for eye-level views.
I hadn’t had any experience doing this or using this combination of materials, so it was more of an experiment for me, and I didn’t want to mess-up by being in too much of a rush - there were lots of other things to occupy my time while I waited for things to set or dry.
Here’s a couple of aerial views of Chippawa Creek…
