The Ship Model Forum

I'm certainly not the first guy to use foam to make a sea. This is how I work this type of sculpt. Lately I've been experimenting with other methods for making oceans aside from my oat and CA approach which is outlined here:
viewtopic.php?f=4&t=155661
For calmer water, you can look here:
viewtopic.php?f=4&t=156538
This sea was done using the method outlined below. I haven't added any wake effects yet. That's largely what this tutorial outlines through to the painting and bow crash.



At the end of this tutorial, I outline a method for shaping the foam with a lighter that produces next to no mess. Carving and sanding styrofoam is horrifically messy and it clings to everything....so consider yourself warned! lol

I know many guys use the pink or blue insulation board. I've seen this stuff be rolled and squeezed with a rolling pint to great effect.

Every time I do a foam sea, I use the pink styrofoam. In the tutorial here, all I had was the white bead-board which is not so great, but it does produce a unique set of surfaces. It comes in a variety of thicknesses. My Z-30 is pretty thick as it was all I had, but 1 inch foam would do nicely. This tutorial is just an example so I don't have an actual ship. Let's pretend that this hacked off hull from a previous build is my waterlined ship. I waterline my hull with a dremmel about a 1/4" below the true waterline.
I simply place my waterlined, completed model down onto the foam and trace an outline


Using a sharp Olfa knife I cut out a hole as neatly as I can

It doesn't matter if the hole isn't perfectly flush with the hull. This is easily addressed later.

Here are some tools that I use to carve and sand my foam. I have covered a wide cardboard tube with coarse sandpaper. This is an indispensable sanding and shaping tool. With this large sanding tube, It is easy to make the v-shaped wake swells that move back and away from the ship. My HMS Prince of Wales is a good example of this wake. The large swells were done with the tube and the overall height of the styrofoam was sanded down to the level of the deepest parts of the swells. http://www.modelshipgallery.com/gallery ... /index.htm I will also use round saw blades, sandpaper, and wood saw to carve my base.

Using a large wood saw and a light touch with an angular, shaving motion, it is easy to carefully create subtle undulations in the sea. Other types of seas can be made by pulling a round saw blade across the sea to roll and tear the foam off into peaks and valleys. It all depends on what you're going for.

Here, the basic swells of the sculpt have been carved with the saw. I'm going for a banded, rolling look.

It is now easy and fun to use my large tube covered in sandpaper to shape and smooth out my hacked-out contours. There are many uses for my sanding tube.

The overall form is coming together and smoothing out.

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Every time the PE sticks to your tweezers, you lose a minute off your life.

PART 2
Once the sea has been shaped and sanded, there is no reason why you couldn't lay dow a bunch of glue and sprinkle oat bran onto the surface. After the oat bran is dried, collaging paper towel on top of the oat surface produces a very convincing ocean surface. Here is a link to that idea/tutorial: viewtopic.php?f=4&t=156536
Using coarse sandpaper, I add refinements and continue to shape and smooth out the form.

I place my ship into it's hole and use lots of epoxy around the waterline to secure it. I no longer install my ship into the base before finishing. I completely make my sea without the ship first, then put the ship in and resolve the cracks with cotton batting (see below)

It is now important to thoroughly vacuum and rid the sculpt of any little bits. I now tear up copious amounts of regular white 8 1/2 x 11 white paper. The pieces should not exceed about 2" across. Larger pieces will wrinkle in linear, strange ways. I use acrylic clear gloss medium to glue these bits down all over the foam sculpt.

First I brush down generous amounts of medium, place the paper down, then brush more medium on top.



The paper easily spans any gaps between the hull and the foam. You can be very precise and create a super flush look.

Here you can see how the bits of paper overlap each other and create a single, smooth surface. They conceal any holes and styrofoam texture.

The surface is completely covered in paper now. Without even letting it dry, I will now use heavy artist's gel medium to affect some smooth waves.

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Every time the PE sticks to your tweezers, you lose a minute off your life.

At this point, you could simply paint the sea and skip any gel medium waves. These days, I'm of the mind that gel is an overly 'sharp' and obvious way of making waves that doesn't look real. I would do my texturing with acrylic clear medium for a convincing rolling ripple. Skipping the gel simply gives a more rolling, softer look that can appear quite adequate as an ocean surface in its own right.
Part 3
I don't simply go with my gel and daub it around carelessly. I use my fingers and carefully apply a little lump of gel. I then shape this lump with my finger by smoothing down on all sides.

I sculpt my waves so that I avoid little spikes and gel-like 'tells'.

I use a brush to carefully manipulate the texture to avoid brushy tells and unwanted artifacts and directions to the texture. It takes me up to an hour or more to do this.

I spend a lot of time down low as if I'm photographing the model. I scrutinize the surface and hunt for anything that isn't water-like in appearance.

Little points and spikes like this are dead giveaways and make the water look crafty and fake.

Having left the sea to dry overnight, I paint the entire surface one single ocean color. I usually use a combination of black, white, and some kind of blue. Here I am using thalo blue.

Assessing the painted sea, I find it to be plagued by little sand-sized foam grits because I was careless and didn't adequately vacuum the sea. I thoroughly sand the surface and re-paint which corrects the problem.


I am now ready to paint my sub-surface, minty green wake effects. Here I have mixed up two colors. One of the minty green colors is just a bit lighter than the sea, the other color is a bit brighter still. I usually make these colors with thalo blue, black, and thalo green. It's hard to say what color this should be, but if you study some photos of real seas and consider your base color, you should be able to come up with two colors that will work. Even one color will work. I discuss ocean colors in this article: viewtopic.php?f=4&t=157447 In it, I whipped up a handy little sea-color chart.

Using my airbrush, I carefully spray the darker color in a broad way where the wake and disturbance would be. I'm usually pretty subtle with how I do this.

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Every time the PE sticks to your tweezers, you lose a minute off your life.

Here I have gone in with the lighter minty color. I've more or less built-out from the darker color. It's as if the minty color is moving down into the darkness of the base. This is the illusion you want.

Here I have completed the painting of the sea. I found that I overdid my minty colors and have gone back over it with a bit of thalo blue and black airbrushing to knock it back a bit. Subtlety is more realistic with this minty color I find. FIX YOUR AIRBRUSHING WITH AN ACRYLIC MATTE MEDIUM BEFORE MOVING FORWARD! If you don't, the airbrushing can reactivate and start contaminating your cotton work.

After the minty color has cured, I am now going to create my whitewater effects with regular medical cotton balls. Be sure the brand you use has no seeds in it. This is important: some cotton balls are made of cotton, and some are made of Rayon. The Rayon balls are way better than cotton. If you can find these, they're awesome for doing wakes.
You can easily pull them between your fingers to create web-like sheets that you can glue down.


I am using gloss acrylic artist's medium to attach the cotton whitewater. I first brush down some medium, place my cotton pull, and brush more medium on top.

The cotton can easily fill any remaining cracks along the waterline.



Lately, I've been finding that I can get a stronger looking web-pattern by quickly stamping a dry piece of cotton to wet it down. The strands bunch together and make coarser veins.

Using the end of my brush, I can manipulate the cotton in different ways to simulate a churning effect from the propellers.

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Every time the PE sticks to your tweezers, you lose a minute off your life.

The more medium you use to soak the cotton, the less visible it will be. In some places, I want my cotton to be brighter and whiter. Usually along the waterline and where the wake has initially spread out from the bow.
It's possible to add cotton here and only lightly wet it. Too much medium everywhere and all the cotton buried in it looks mushy and low contrast. A little contrast adds punch and realism I think.

Sometimes I will add a piece of cotton by one end and fold it over on itself to make a cresting wave of whitewater. I don't soak this, but leave it semi-raw so that it is bright and white.

BOW EXPLOSION/WHITEWATER SPRAY

I am certainly not the first guy to use cotton to make a bow wave. This is how I'd go about doing it. Probably no different in technique than some other similar looking bow crashes out there.

To make the bow explosion, I simply use puffs of cotton that have a directionality to them. I brush down some medium and attach the cotton in sections to build up my bow crash.

Here the different chunks are adding up to a big whitewater explosion

In the past, I have simply sprayed this fuzz to 'fix' it in place. I no longer find that this to be convincing enough.
I now coat my cotton with tiny touches of acrylic clear gloss medium to form a glassy net around the cotton. To do this, I use a tiny brush and very small amounts of clear medium. I gently touch the medium onto the surface of the cotton and control the fuzz to be a unit. I don't want to over-soak the cotton; I just want to create a modest coating over 30% of the cotton.


As things get a bit more covered, I can carefully manipulate the goopy cotton into splash like shapes.

I check the explosion for all angles to make sure there are no cotton hairs sticking up to ruin the illusion. It's one, glassy explosive object made of mysterious materials.... fuzzy strands betray the method.

To conclude my sea, I coat the ocean surface with HIGH gloss acrylic varnish from Liquitex. This product is very shiny (comparable to epoxy), without the yellowing properties. I no longer use any epoxy in my seas due to its fugitive nature.


Here is the final sea...Not the greatest as it was quickly done for this demo but it basically shows what I do.

This HMS Howe was done exactly as per above. As you can see, I did not not and add gel medium waves to the paper layer. What you're seeing here is just paper that has been thoroughly coated and sanded. I then painted it as per above, did my cotton stuff, and applied several coats of Liquitex HIGH gloss medium



As an alternative to sanding and sawing your sea sculpt, I discovered that you can make very natural ocean swells and undulations by holding your sea inverted over your head (before attaching the ship of course) and simply using a lighter at about 8-10 inches away. The heat causes the foam to recede in very predictable and controllable ways. Passing the lighter back and forth directionally produces very convincing swells and ocean rhythms. The sea in these photos was created entirely and only with a lighter and a bit of light sanding. As per the tutorial above, I I finished this sea by coating it with paper towel (not regular paper on this one to consolidate the overall texture. Had there been a ship in there, the paper towel would have solved the small gaps along the waterline as well; The lighter thing works great for extremely rough and turbulent seas. It's a much neater approach as well.

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Every time the PE sticks to your tweezers, you lose a minute off your life.

Fantastic, especially the close-up details on how exactly you manipulate the cotton and mixing the colours. Link added to the Compendium!

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De quoi s'agit-il?

Great! Thank you very much!

And... just one note, instead of using a saw and the cardboard tube, did you try to just squeeze the foam by using a roller pin (for rolling out dough) to create the swell? A bottle of beer or whatever will do the job as well...


Happy modelling ~ Olaf!

Yes, I tried rolling and squashing the foam as well. It doesn't seen to work as well with white bead-board. But it's definitely a good trick for subtle undulations etc.
I've seen it work really well with pink insulation board.
C

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Every time the PE sticks to your tweezers, you lose a minute off your life.

Why is the crappy white styrofoam your material of choice for this? Will pink or blue insulation foam also work, or is it too dense? Or is it just because the crappy white stuff is cheap and easily available, usually as packing material?

Well, I chose the white stuff because it's soft and easy to shape and carve. Also, the pink stuff is crazy expensive. If you think about what I've done in the past with oats, I actually don't mind a bit of texture before I cover the foam with paper. The little bumps and imperfections sit under the paper and only contribute positively to the ocean surface effect. If I don't sand the white foam after shaping, the wave effect will be even more pronounced after the paper.
By the time I cover the sides and top with paper, the crappiness of the bead-board is long gone and it's quite tough...plus, You can't beat 20 bucks for a 4x8 sheet!
I'm dirt poor these days so I'm trying to cheapen out the models as much as possible. The oat bran and CA can work great, but man, at 25 bucks a bottle....2 bottles or more for a big BB sea. Yikes.

_________________
Every time the PE sticks to your tweezers, you lose a minute off your life.

I usually use Celluclay coated with LOTS of acrylic gel, but this looks a lot better and it looks like even I will be able to do it! Good tips. Thanks.

superb!!

Great
Thanks for sharing!

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...in my shipyard...

Great tutorial... again! I'm glad you showed us an alternative to all the oats and CA. You're going to make an artist out of me yet!
Dave

Wow!! Great tutorial I will be giving this a go when my bismarck is done!

An excellent tutorial as usual from Chris. Definitely one to try out in the not-too-distant future.

Have you ever though of making a video - or series of videos - showing how you do this from beginning to end?

Fantastic work!

Many thanks for posting

Cuchulainn

Glad its inspiring. Videos would be a good idea, but then I'd have to shoot them, edit them, convert them...bah. Too much work! I tried to make these kinds of things as clear as possible with the pictures.
Honestly, it's just an idea or a framework concept onto which you have to apply your own trial and error, practice, etc. I see guys taking my concepts and fusing them with things they do as well.

_________________
Every time the PE sticks to your tweezers, you lose a minute off your life.