Hi everyone,
Back again with the last installment of this article run on basing for
Dystopian War flyers. Today I want to talk about a quick and easy way to make arctic water effects.
In the spirit of the other posts, I wanted to find an inexpensive way to build an arctic basic. After a lot of brainstorming and experimentation, I found a way to do it in a convincing manner.
The first thing you need in any arctic sea is icebergs. An economic way of achieving this,
in scale, is to tear out some pieces of sponge and soak them in diluted PVA glue and stick them to your bases.
Once dry, the sponge hardens and you can continue to add several layers of
Vallejo's Water Effects. This will help to smooth out the texture of the sponge into a more icy structure. When you are happy with the texture - paint the iceberg white. This will help bring out any defects and you will see if you need to work more on it.
When dry, the next step is to add floating ice. This is the simpler part of the project. All you need to do is cut out some pieces of plasti-card, or an old credit card (sanded down), or plastic calling cards (you know - the posh ones) and glue them to the base. Make sure you have several smaller parts floating around.
Before you start to paint everything, make sure to mask the upright stands, and then paint the whole thing white. I prefer to use an airbrush for this, but brush work will do fine as well. Just remember that it is better to paint several thin layers than one thick layer.
The next painting step is the water. This is done in the exact same fashion as the first post, but just remember arctic water which is ice ridden can tend to be brighter, so do you research and paint accordingly.
The last step is to give a bit of body to the ice plates. I did this by mixing
Vallejo's Water Effects with some snow product and adding several layers to the ice-plates, letting each application dry before adding the next. Any brand of artificial snow will do, but the fine it is the better. I also gave the icebergs and the water a coating or two of the Vallejo Water Effects to give just it that wet look.
A small tip - if you are feeling adventurous, you can try adding some
clear blue paint in minute quantities to the
Vallejo Water Effects in order to create blue ice or simply a bluish reflection. Always do some tests first before applying to your bases first.
A quick snapshot shows what the bases look like with some fliers attached to them. As you can see, although the ice effects are small, they are properly scaled to the air-ships. I am sure you will agree, arctic sea really suits the COA.
The last picture is a group shot of all the bases put together. It gives the air-fleet a completely new look and helps to bring out that
army individuality we all strive for. My only critique at this point is to either make all the bases just water and explosions or all arctic. I mixed them up solely for the purposes of this article.
Well that is a wrap for this article run. I hope you enjoyed them, and hopefully learned something useful you can adopt for your own use. Next week I will be posting up my finished Wolverine model.
Until then farewell and good health.
NR
