Brilthor Keep – An elven stronghold in the Blue mountains – Part 7Creatief, Gastblog, Nieuws

Gastblog door Jeroen Mies / Guest blog by Jeroen Mies

Brilthor 7

When completing the lights and finishing up the structure of the top level of the diorama it was time for another experiment: adding artificial water to the riverbed on the ground level. This was also something I had never done before. And though I thought I was well prepared by watching dozens of Youtube video’s, I learned the hard way that pouring resin water can be quite difficult.

To see the end result, keep on reading…

In all video’s and instructions I had read, it was recommended to pour a small layer of resin so I kept my first layer at 3-4 mm. But since it was quite a large surface, this was still quite a lot of resin. In the first pictures the resin can be seen on top of the clear blue paint I had added to provide the illusion of deep waters that run through the mountains.

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These three images were taken on day 1 and day 3, but on the fourth day something terrible could be seen. The resin had cracked on several places and the initial beautiful result was no longer there.

I never quite found out what had gone wrong, but it might have been the big surface area that was being covered (almost 45 x 45 cm of surface is water on this project) was the source of the problem. Probably the resin connects very well to all the rough surfaces on the edges (rocks, stone, grasses etc) and when the resin shrinks  it cracks in the middle?

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After the initial disappointment I decided to pour another layer (which I had always intended anyhow) and add a dark blue wash to the resin. The wash I was intended to darken the waters, but I also was hoping this would also hide the cracks underneath this layer.

 

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It was also at this point that I remembered that I had originally planned to add more colour to the lower layers and less for each layer I would pour on top. But I had forgotten to add a blue colour to the first layer. Still, this could easily be corrected now.

 

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I also positioned the three water creatures and made sure that one of them was jumping out of the water and made sure his tail would be hanging in the resin, to add the visual effect.

Again when the resin is poured and still in its liquid form it is extremely beautiful, so I was hoping for the best and for the next days watched the resin cure and dry… 🙂

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Five days later the resin had cured and three obvious things had happened.

  1. The lowest layer of resin had lost its transparancy
  2. The second layer had lost much of its dark blue colour
  3. The cracks were still, be it somewhat less, visible through the resin

So I decided to go for a different approach. On all places where the cracks were visible I placed dark blue stones from an old aquarium.

ConniesBoekenblog-JMF-20190805-0001On top and between these rocks I repeated step 2 twice more. So I poured about 3-4 mm’s of resin mixed with a dark blue wash and waited 3-4 days between each layer to fully cure.

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After the last layer had cured I also added a layer of water effects to add more ripples on the water surface.

What is seen on the image below is the water effects when added but after 2 days the colour became transparent and small ripples could be seen.

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Even though it cost me about three weeks, and 3 bottles of resin, the end result was absolutely gorgeous.

A deep, darkblue rocky waterbed with 3 awesome water creatures (Daemons of Tzeentch) swimming above its surface. Just like I imagined.

What exactly caused the cracks to appear after 4 days is still a mystery to me. I still suspect is that the size of the surface, which is very large compared to every other project I have seen, is mostly the cause of the problem.

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My next step was to finish up the top layer with additional details and structure.

From here on I wanted to make sure nothing would spill on the bottom layer, since this was nearly completely painted and had most of the final decorations and vegetation in place.

I decided to add some small details using XPS foam which gives a lot of flexibility to add walls and small barriers.

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Followed by base coating everything in black, followed by layers of grey in different shades and adding a light white drybrush.

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Here are the links to other parts of the series on building Brilthor Keep…

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