A few months ago I showed off my class copy of the wonderful Diabolical Terrain Fountain and I figured it was worth a tutorial on how I painted this piece! As a reminder this is what the finished product looked like. Let’s delve into the process of painting and making the realistic looking water!
First things first, lets take a quick look at the materials I used for this terrain.
The first thing you’ll need to do is make your flowing water. This takes at least overnight to dry so you have to plan ahead. I used Liquitex Super Heavy Gel by spreading it thinly over a piece of wax paper. I also used a sandwich bag but it was more difficult to remove the dried gel from the bag than from the wax paper. When spreading the gel you want to use a paint brush and choose one direction to brush the gel on the paper. The gel will naturally show the brush marks and in a fountain the water flows down, not in random circles or loops.
Once the gel dries you simply peel it off the wax paper and you have a sheet of dried gel you can use to represent water!
With that the hardest part of the project is finished. I sprayed the fountains with a dark grey prime, and then did a lighter spray from a 45 degree angle of a light grey. Once that dried I had my students paint the various stones XV-88, Mournfang Brown, and Agrax Earthshade before drybrushing with Karak Stone and Flayed One flesh.
After that the I tore the water effects into strips and glued them in the fountain with super glue as you can see in the pictures above. I then used Let’s Resin, UV resin, High Viscosity and poured it into the bottom of the fountain and the top sections. I ran the resin down a popsicle stick which helps remove bubbles as the resin settles. Once that was done a few minutes under a UV light and it was all done!
I do like using UV resin. In the past I’ve used two part resin, but for small projects like this I think UV resin is the way to go. With two part resin you need to make sure the ratio is perfect, especially for small projects like this. With a small project if the ratio is off even a small amount the resin won’t cure. This isn’t a problem with two part resin!
I hope this gives you the confidence to work with resin yourself! If you have any questions please leave it in the comments!
-Wachtmeister
PS I would be remiss in not thanking Diabolical Terrain for generously donating copies of this fountain to Hobby University to teach these techniques to our students. Feel free to go buy lots of stuff to thank them for supporting the community!
The Wachtmeister's Patrol 