I will use a few different colors of paint, plus gloss medium, on a river and a large lake planned for my new layout. I'll have fishing and pleasure boats; what can I do to the "water" to make it look like the boats are moving? To make the fishing boats look like they're sitting in water, perhaps filing the bottom of the boats until they are flat would help?
You can file your bottoms (called a half hull model), but you can also place the boats before you pour the meduim so they ate actually sitting in the "water". Another option in the new "pourable water" from woodland scenics whjich is a resin you melt and pour. There is also a low-fume two part resin product made for refinishing furniture that we use at the BSME, but the name of it escapes me at the moment.
As for moving, Use the Same techniques as for making ripples. (sorry, somebody else can be more specific) A boat generates splash where the angled bow straightens out and a Wake which is V shaped coming of the rear. generally a pleasure or fishing boat that is moving at High speed sits wit it's bow slightly elevated and a large "Wave of water right near the back of the boat. A faster moving boat sits more level and the wake coming off the bake is less pronounced.
My local hobby shop owner is buiding a store layout and using the new Woodland Scenics water products. He draws an X-Acto knife blade through the stuff as it is setting up to create ripples, waves, etc. Like Trainboy said - the bow of boat creates ripples or waves that form a Vee that goes outwards and back from the bow as the boat moves through the water. So use the knife blade to create those ripples. [ 25. July 2002, 01:24: Message edited by: Hank Coolidge ]
One time I saw an Ntrak module at a show that had a piece of milky white glass painted brown on the bottom, for water. Which in and of itself was a pretty neat way to represent still water. What was really neat was the moving boat that slid across it. The guy used an old magnetic skating rink that was a Christmas decoration, which moved the boat with a magnet on the bottom in a wavy circle around the river. What really made this slick was that the wake from the boat was made out of a piece of thin clear plastic sheet with the whitish parts painted on. The wake piece was glued onto the bottom of the boat and the whole thing travelled around the circle. You had to get within 12" of the thing to see that it wasn't really water.
