I just did the first of two planned pours of a creek using Envirotex and was looking over the results so far. I think my creek bed painting turned out to be a little too much of a blue/green color.
I was thinking about how to tone the color down or muddy it up a little. My thoughts were to maybe add a little tint color to the second pour but I'm not sure what color to use. A drop of light brown? Olive? Black?
Second option might be to add a very thin washed out paint color on the first layer after it sets, before pouring the second Envirotex. Again, what color?
Third option would be to leave it alone as I might get it all screwed up if either above option is tried.
Yep a little too Blue for my taste but not to worry
you can change all that
My first pour was clear over a painted river bed that i painted Pullman Green
WAY TOO DARK !!!
next pour i mixed some lighter green in with the enviortex JUST A DAB !!!
about the size of an eraser on a pencil
MUCH BETTER !!
Keep trying you'll find some thing you like
TerryinTexas
See my Web Site Here
http://conewriversubdivision.yolasite.com/
Was the dab of color you used acrylic paint, and what color do you think I should try?
Chartiers wrote: Was the dab of color you used acrylic paint, and what color do you think I should try?
Yes
Bought this at Michaels Craft store The color is called evergreen
Here's the Pond
Here's one river
Here's the other
STOP! Tearout is likely!
Head off to the LHS and get some of those little clear plastic measuring cups, 50 for about $2.
Color is a tricky business, and tinting Envirotex a matter of near microscopic quantities of tinting agent.
On a white sheet of paper, set up a grid of cups, preferably on your layout to use the exact same lighting. In the bottom of each cup, duplicate your existing E'tex pour, in color and depth.
Now experiment, to see how to save the existing pour.
You only have so much depth for additional pours. If you get it wrong, not only do you have to tear out the existing pour, you will also probably have to re-craft the whole water area base, from plaster cloth on up.
I learned this the hard way when my E'tex formed a sea of tiny bubbles on the lakebed floor over a snady surface.
Tinting went smooth, because I used the clear cups and tiny drops of tint on a toothpick to get the color right first.
You MIGHT save the existing pour by sheer luck, picking the mitigating tint to make it look right out of millions of possibilities, but you are more likely to make it worse without testing first.
I think you can save what you've aready done, and I think green, yellow or both will probably get you there, but I'd definitely test the theory out first, that looks like an area you have MANY hours invested into already. No sense taking a chance on ripping it all out unnecessarily.
Chartiers wrote: what color do you think I should try?
what color do you think I should try?
Your river Your choice But I used the clear plastic cups as mentioned to test
my colors
Also did some Web Searching for river pictures to find what i liked and then tried to duplicate it
Here's a photo close to what you already have
http://www.wvaraft.com/popup.php?image=25
I'd be tempted to paint on top of what you have poured
and once i liked it then put a clear coat of Etex on top
you can repaint several times without wasting
Etex
It will also give you a chance to paint your bridge abutment
unless you are going to leave it white
I sure do not want to strip the creek back to the base surface and start over - no way given that there's over 100" involved not to mention the rocks and bridge abutments that would have to be reworked. The first pour, which was clear, was a full 16oz.
Testing with small cups sounds like a good idea. I could sit the cups directly on top of the creek the way it is now, once it fully cures, so I can see the effect of trying different colors in the tint of the second pour.
I wish I was better at color combinations. My first try would probably be with just a dab of yellow, dark brown or a dark green. If I cannot get a good confidence level during some testing, I'll leave it the way it is.
Yellow on what you have now will try to make the blue go green.
Green on what you have now will shift the blue green towards a greener green.
A potential problem will be two very visibly different layer colors. In testing I'd like to see what happened with a relatively darker green but not so much dye, so you have some opacity but not totally opaque. Atop that, a thinner mix of yellow-green might make what you have now a deep greenish with a hint of blue, and look like a REAL deep river.
Another suggestion would be another two layer additional pour, with the sandwich layer being a greener green blue than what's there now, followed by green only or green-yellow.
Light, color, transparency, opacity, even refractive index all add up to a complex equation. Don't be afraid to test unusual combinations, all it costs is tint and Envirotex.
For what it's worth, after much testing here, we used WS meltable water beads. The colors in our LHS's E'tex variant came out nice, we really liked a real thin algae green tint, but the surface of the stuff would NOT dry smooth, strange unevenness, and it refused to adhere well to a sandy bottom, leading to the sea of bubbles mentioned earlier.
The WS beads have a thin golden tint, and most of the coloration comes from the paint on the river bottom, mixed and blended wet, before ever pouring the "water".