Here’s the complete water feature, with two layers of varnish applied over the painted water and photographed under a daylight bulb. The water effect sort of works but has some problems the photo doesn’t reveal. I applied a second coat of varnish too early and there’s some crackling between the layers that is visible on close inspection. If I’m going to use that polyurethane varnish again I think I’ll go with one coat only.
Varnished Water Feature
Jesus man, that daylight bulb sure does the trick eh? Looks damned professional. Was that shot on white paper, or did you photoshop out the background? Very nice in either case.
Oh, and the water feature looks good too ;)
Yeah it’s funny that a light bulb should make that much of a difference to photography when you consider modern digital cameras are supposed to be able to adjust the white-balance. This wasn’t even a very good shot because I just chucked the terrain down on a bit of foam board and lit it with a single overhead table lamp, then the GIMP’s ‘magic wand’ was used to turn the background a flat white.
The nice lady at Lighting Plus in Newmarket told me they were ’shadow free light bulbs for drawing’ which would have been very impressive :) but alas it will still take multiple light sources to banish shadows for figure shots.
I’m very happy with the terrain too considering I threw it together in two evenings just to try painting some water. The water feature itself is a little too linear to be very convincing though.
Sold this piece for $17NZ on TradeMe too…