How I made this amazing blue mountain river diorama...and nearly messed it up completely!

Well,

this

is definitely the brightest

river

I've ever done and the

blue

st and probably the most problematic as well. There will be times during

this

video where I don't talk much and that's because it's self explanatory, but I

made

one. One bug in particular I'd like to discuss, so stick with it, however, that won't happen for a while yet, so in the meantime, let's move on. The main body of this piece was

made

using a product called a sculpture block and there. Most of the problems experienced later with pouring the resin are not a problem with the product itself, but rather because I don't coat the product properly before pouring the resin, but like I said, we'll get to that later.

I don't really know what a sculpture block is. It is not extruded polystyrene, it is more of a very dense florist foam. It is not cut with a hot knife, but is carved very easily with a sharp blade. Here I am using a cheap florist's knife and I can tell. You think carving a

river

channel like this creates a lot of mess so you'll want to have your vacuum cleaner on hand and it gets a lot of dust so you might want to wear a mask. There are a lot of fine particles in this foam and now I.

I'm going to stop talking for a moment because there is a lot of carving. All I will say is be very careful when using a sharp knife, don't try to pick up pieces of foam that are too big for the knife to handle. Blades like this can break easily and can obviously cause injuries and that is why later on you will see me using a table knife to cut through harder pieces of foam, but anyway enjoy watching the next section of the video and I will come back in a moment . Okay, so with the main channel complete, it was time to start carving the rock shapes to achieve this.

I looked at some photos on Google and then, you know, copied them. I mainly used the florist's knife again. Please be careful, but like you. I'll see in a moment, I also used a pointed skewer, although a cocktail stick would be just as good if it was pointed and everything really can't go that wrong here just keep looking at your photos and take it easy, so yeah, don't wait . the knife like I'm holding it here I don't know why I didn't do it very sensible here I'm using the blunt end of the skewer to make impressions in the rock this foam suits this type of work quite well and remember at this stage, everything It's all about the details, but you can add too many details that they are indistinguishable from each other, it leaves some nice rock panels visible, the foam itself has a nice texture, not too different from the rock, a detail that really adds.

The realistic look of the rock on another level is the stratum lines, which are made first with the blunt tip and then with the pointed tip, so when I said before that a cocktail stick would be as good as a skewer, it was fine, It depends on whether your skewer has a blunt end or it's not easy enough to dull the end I guess, and on a cocktail stick the tip is pointy and rough, this really is just a case of scraping the surface in one direction using the pointed end of your cocktail stick. or skewer as we've discussed, I'm not sure this is a team skewer versus team cocktail stick type situation, but if it were, you know it would surely be on the team skewer, so when all the carving on the rocks Now that's done, you're going to want to tidy up the river bed and I'm using my trusty table knife for this, just scraping it down and smoothing it all out, this is all going to be covered in texture anyway and it gets a lot of dust like I said.

You'll want to remove any excess just look at all that clutter if the room isn't cluttered it doesn't feel like you've really been working anyway look at those beautiful hand carved rocks and the next step was applying textures For the piece I wasn't worried about the colors in this stage because all of this would be primed anyway. I just look for the textures and these are applied very roughly to make sure there are a lot of textures on the surface. I certainly did. I don't want any of this to have a uniform texture. This thick Vallejo mud is one of my favorite texture pastes.

It has little pieces of twigs and leaves and everything in it. This isn't a muddy scene though, so I used it as a kind of rough ground texture and here I am applying it along the river bank happily not realizing that later none of this would be visible at all and I actually needed to cover the river bed with a layer about four times thicker than that or using a sculptor's mold or something to prevent the foam from reacting with the resin. I really should have thought of this beforehand, but I didn't. So what are you going to do to fix things afterwards?

That's what you're going to do after having a bit of a tantrum. and sitting with your head in your hands and that kind of thing anyway before all that comes the rest of the texture and this is what I used with the not very dry pasta, it was easy to press a little bit of this into place, but you will need to also use a little stage glue, which as we all know is one part matte medium and three parts water and for these larger stones you will also need a drop of white glue underneath or mod podge matte and you can also use the mod matte podge. instead of the matte medium in their scenic glue for these stones I chose from my garden path, however I forgot to show the gluing process here, I was just testing how to place them and here is the scenic glue I mentioned before, there is nothing of bad to go a little overboard with this just to make sure everything is set securely, you can blot up the excess with a paper towel but then make sure to let everything dry, this should only take an hour or two and , when it comes to primer, I use this plastic oatmeal hydraulic primer because it is meant to be foam safe, but I would still avoid spraying too close so the propellant doesn't have a chance to eat the foam and for the rock base coat I used two shades of brown, yellow and a kind of stone color and then I just mixed them all together.

There wasn't a great technique for this as you can see on the rock walls, however I chose just the color of the stone as a base layer to highlight the rocks. I used the game color verdigris. From Vallejo I tend to apply highlights before washing as this gives more nuances to the colors. I don't really like dry brushing as a final step, it doesn't create a very naturalistic look and speaking of washes, this is where I went over the entire rock. surface with black wash, paying special attention to cracks like this and so painting the wash over the surface also ensures that it gets into all the little pores of the rock wall where I wanted a subtle tone on the rocks that I diluted the washed. a little bit of water and as you can see from the river of wash running down my river bed, I used a lot of wash on this piece, a trusty paper towel to rescue me again after a couple of hours of drying, the model was Looked like this, the black wash really accentuated all the beautiful details on the rock surface.

I only used these contrast paints on a couple of stones at the bottom of the river bed and this subtlety didn't show up at all once I applied the water, so I might as well have painted them. a dark gray or something, but maybe what made the difference was painting the river bed

blue

. I knew I was going to dye the resin too, but I didn't want to leave anything to chance and I felt that painting the river bed blue would add. I was also looking for more depth in the river again, I was looking for subtlety and I didn't have to have everything before my eyes.

This highlight was obscured by the resin and later by the water products I used on the resin. Anyway, I blended the blue into the stony edges using a little more of the stone acrylic color to simulate the moss growing along the Riverside. I used two colors of fine grass from Woodland Scenic. This was burnt grass and a green mix mixed together and then I painted with some scenic glue. The rocks where I wanted the moss to go were sprayed on top of the fine grass and then I sprayed the entire moss with isopropyl alcohol to break up the surface tension before dripping in more scenic glue to secure everything in place.

I used a piece of the resin dam. from a sheet of plastic that I cut from an old package and to attach this to the edges of the piece I used a bit of white glue and then carefully pressed the plastic into place. You'll see later that I actually used some duct tape to secure it. The resin I usually use is clear epoxy from CFS, they are based in Cornwall here in the UK, you simply mix it in two equal parts by volume and we will add dye to part a which is the resin part and you can see here I have measured the volume of each part in a mixing glass and the dye is glass paint.

Now it looks like this is a clear gloss paint ideal for tinting epoxy resin and I used a lot of turquoise, a little bit of green and a little bit of yellow I mixed them all together until I got the kind of turquoise blue-green color I was going for and I started by putting a little bit on the end of my mixing rod and mixing this into the resin and then basically mixing in little bits. more at a time until I was happy with the dye and as you can see here, I already introduced a lot of bubbles into this resin because I mixed it too quickly.

I wasn't too worried at this point because I thought I could just use my blowtorch when I poured the resin and remove all the bubbles, but it turns out these bubbles were the least of my worries. I made the carp a little darker than I intended the river to be and that's because when you add part b it dilutes the color a little keep mixing the resin until all the color is well mixed and there are no streaks left and when it doesn't There are streaks. It is when you know that the two parts of the resin are well mixed.

There is always a nervous moment when pouring your resin. Will the dam hold? Will the resin react with the foam? Yes, the dam held. Yeah, oh, there are some bubbles in there. Hmm, that's a little worrying. Oh, I mean, oh, look at my beautiful water, all ruined and everything. I tried to fix things and ended up dragging streaks of resin across the surface. Oh well, I wasn't going to abandon the room. I hate wasting time and materials. No, I was going to fix this and that little resin lip that happens. when the resin dries and rises up the dam, that was going to come in handy after a bit of cleaning, a gentle reminder to use the knife more carefully than it seems.

I am doing it here and here is my solution. Water ripples in forest landscapes. It's very thick. gel, I just poured a layer over the surface and this hid the bubbles pretty well and the ones that didn't hide the flowing water well have bubbles don't they? This takes a long time to dry, so you can push it with the brush and it will find its level again and look, that lip I mentioned has acted like a dam, how convenient, but of course this product is not called water waves for nothing, As it dries, you can rub it with your brush to create the most beautiful waves on it. surface of the water, you may have to repeat this over and over, no, like I said, it takes a long time to dry, but it actually turned out a little too shiny for my taste and I wanted more subtle waves there, so I went back to my blow dry and the Trusty mod podge gloss applied a thin coat over the water waves once they dried, of course, and used a straw to blow them into beautiful, delicate waves.

I also added some more details of the water surface where the current would flow from the edges of the rocks. etc and this is what it looked like after I finished applying the mod podge and this is what it looked like after about an hour The Vallejo foam and snow texture is basically a very thick acrylic, as far as I can tell, but I use it for white water anyway, it's easy to overdo it with white water so go easy on what you do, don't use alcohol to wipe off the excess paint because it will just eat up the mod podge and possibly the water ripples too, although I don't know.

Probably about the waves, since in most of my

diorama

s the vegetation comes from

diorama

precipe.com. They are based in Italy and I am often told that I pronounce their name incorrectly, but in any case they are the best landscapes I have ever seen. used and to glue them I use World War Scenic Precipe Precipe bait glue. I don't know any incredible things, although many of their products are stabilized natural material, which creates incredibly realistic landscapes, as you can imagine, I'm not really sure why. I painted the primer glue onto the rock surface before applying these little pieces of static grass.

I should have painted the glue on the bottom of the tuft, even the mod podge matte dries to a bit of a satin finish so save yourself some touch up time by applying the glue to the bottom of the tuft ah look, looks like I've learned the lesson, although they tend to get stuck to your fingers when you do this for rocky terrain like this, it was important to go sparingly with the vegetation but also avoid that. Kind of an unnatural jagged look, adding height helps with this and since I didn't want to put any trees in this model,These bushes served that purpose very well, many of these little strands can be planted between strands of static grass and other vegetation and all they need is a little glue on the bottom of each one and they stand out very well except for that and that's nothing eh, I definitely won't make the same mistake again with resin and foam, but after all I'm still very happy with the result.

I hope you enjoyed it. Thanks for joining me. You might like to know that I've started writing an eBook and am posting each new chapter as I write it on my Patreon page. Each chapter will be a very detailed tutorial on a diorama project not seen on my YouTube channel and also considerably more in-depth. I just posted the first tutorial and it's over 50 pages with over 170 photos that you can also download.the tutorials on my website hello workshop dot co dot uk but the best deal definitely ended up on my patreon page and I honestly couldn't do this without my patreon followers so thank you very much to all of them and thank you for joining I will see you next time bye