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Jaws

Back to the water (and sweat)

Since my baby was born 2 years ago, my wife unleashed a pityless war on my dioramas, arguing with very good reasons that the polyester resin I use to make my water in scale would also be my watery grave as toxic fumes pour out the diorama practically forever, even once it is set. So I roomed most of my dioramas in the garden shed and switched to Epoxy resin instead which becomes harmless roughly one week after setting. Two big problems with this resin however, it’s almost thrice the price as polyester one, and it also dries after more than 12 hours depending on the ambient heat, which certainly limits the amount of work you can do in a day. Its only true advantage when it comes to model making is that it doesn’t shrink as much as polyester resin.

I prepared the oil colours needed for the tinting of the resin. I used mainly green based transparent oils as I wanted something that could make some sort of contrast with the red mouth –brown hull. Of course I set up for a very dark mix between black and green paint to be applied at the place underneath the wreck.

So I applied first a completely transparent thin coat of resin so that I could get a great level of transparency near the hull –the great advantage would be of course that the viewer would be able to make out quite a bit of the hull under the sea. Then I applied a lightly tinted green coat, and then after an anormous drying time; both a strongly green tinted coat and also my mostly black tint for the inside of the boat (image 26.)

But now was the moment of truth, and I needed the right timing to be able to succeed. Because however nicely tinted that water was, the boat was still not INSIDE the water. So this is how I did: As my 4 coats of resin were still sticky, the slow drying time of the Epoxy resin allowed the piece of water to be probably sort of ripped. So I put some chemical resistant gloves, quickly unmoulded the sea and ripped it of near the point of the arrow shaped hull–I was lucky as the resin didn’t really broke but accepted the strong torsion. I picked my boat and shove it quickly in the opening and closed it straight away, I then put some pinch kind of tool for the resin to glue again on the place of the wound and it basically set up like that.

Once it was done, the next step was to paint a first coat of small waves –so once again I used some slightly tinted acrylic gel and forgot the movements of my had so that I had something looking rather realistic in the end. Then I happened not be really happy about that first coat, but that did’nt matter much as a lot of other coats would be to follow (image 27.)

That’s it guys, if you want to be able to do some nice water, you have to create dark areas and highligts in it, just like you would do if you were about to paint a figure. So I tinted some extra resin with a rather darker shade of green and applied it in the hollow areas of on my waves and ripples. When it began to dry, I pushed the resin above so that there would be less transitions between the tints. I also incresed the dark shadows under the hull (image 28.)

Then I applied another coat of small riplles done out of acrylic gel and yet another coat of resin until I was satisfied (image 29.)

Then I realized that the place where I ripped the resin in order to insert the boat was still visible, so I tried to hide it by placing some small ripples there. Last but not least, if there were some nice bits of colour and shapes, still lacked some real texture on the waves themselves, this is way I used some Microscale Microclear which is a very heavy varnish that leaves a lot of relief on the resin when you apply it by just touching the surface again and again (image 30.)