Painting water

[strewart]

Does anyone have any tips for painting water well, or know of any tutorials/guides online? A bit of a search on LO and google has given me little results so far.. I'm interested in painting bases to look like they are in water, and I also have a plastic water feature on one of my models that I will need to choose colours to paint and highlight it with.

I know that for the bases you can get artificial water effect, or even use PVA glue and mix a bit of blue ink with it or something. I don't know what to do for the basecoat on the base though, put sand or paint it some kind of blue/green?

Cheers.

[cebwj]

How to Make Wargames Terrain touches briefly on the subject, but not nearly enough to warrant a buy. Maybe you should look into the various water effects that is on the market, GW has one you can easily obtain. They are easy to use and paint right!

[Cheredanine]

do a search on the web for "woodland Scenics" they produce a good range of water effects and have tutorials on their site

[Tekore]

The Woodland Scenics water is nice, and you just add a touch of very thin light blue to it, it comes out perfect.

Tekore

[Rabbit]

do a search on the web for "woodland Scenics" they produce a good range of water effects and have tutorials on their site

This is the stuff for still water. There is also a 'cousin' product called Water Affects for simulating waves.

[strewart]

Hey guys, I know this is an old thread but I finally got around to painting the water effect in question.



Thoughts? I'm still not sure what to do with the bases, whether to put sand underneath. I could either put sand down and paint it up, then put that realistic water or PVA/blue ink on top, or I could skip the sand leave the base blue as it is and add the PVA/blue ink to that. And I'm not sure where to go from here with the colours of the water, I think it should be highlighted up to skull white at the very tips but that would be fairly hard to do.

[swiecki]

Hey. Although the way you modeled the guy with the water swirling around him is freakin awesome, I can't say the water looks realistic. It looks lke some regal blue on some darker blue mix (or just a pure darker blue). I would put in more variety, as it is a large area, and work on the blending a bit more. You have very clearly defined lines between the colors.

After it looks a bit more like water (I applaud your efforts so far) I would paint it with several coats of gloss varnish.

[strewart]

It actually started as a mixture of enchanted blue and scaly green, the reason it goes so suddenly from dark to light is because of the blue ink I used. There is also a bit of green ink on it, but that didn't look as good. I agree the colour does need a lot more work, but thats why I'm here.

[sodcactus]

Take a look at Terragenesis, they have extensive articles about making different sorts of terrain, including water. For example this article

[rp252]

I really depends on what sort of effect you want to go for. If you intend the base to look like deep water then I would avoid sand altogether. For this I would work on the paint job of the base as detailed above, and when it is ready cover it in a thin layer of water effect/PVA. If you were keen on painting the very choppy bits of water as white foam, I would paint this on top of the water effect otherwise it will just look like bubbles under the surface.

If you wanted to go for a shallow water look then the fine sand approach would be the best idea.

Hope it helps,

Rich.