Paint: Fountain of Youth

A few colors and a lot of mood

Without further ado: the primed version

Backdrop painting

I painted the backdrop first. It fills a lot of space with color and creates a certain mood. Since I’m not a canvas artist, I can't really foresee what the outcome will be - or even implement a plan. So I have to live with the unexpected.

The whole backdrop was a fast session of an hour, at most one and a half.
I took some online references of painted forests and stippled colors on the plastic card with a big brush. “Stippled” in the sense that the colors appear as leaves. The colours are a wild mixture of yellow, green, blue and red.

I could have slipped the green and mix it with the others, but I needed a lot of green and in such cases I try to save time.

Beside the stippling I made some brown stripes for the trees and branches. I think the most important part is the color transition. The dark blue on the ground and center and the bright yellows on the sides and top. Finally some touches of bright blue as a sky shining through the leaves.

Rubbish Rubber

Have a closer look at the picture with the miniature in front of the backdrop? Did you see the glossy border of the basin? That's not a gloss varnish, but the rubber on the edge got tacky.

I tried some varnish but that didn't help at all. The varnish didn't really stick on the surface. Presumably the primer / ink mix reacted with the rubber.
I used a thin layer of plastic putty to cover the whole rubber. It looks more rough now but for an old fountain, that's reasonable. Painting the basin wasn't spectacular at all. The same green as in the backdrop, with a lot of yellow tinted white.
The green is also mixed in all the colours of the ground.
I started the water with browns, greens and yellow similar to the backdrop - and it appears like a puddle of mud. I had no clue why then, but decided to try again later.

The thing with the mold lines

The statue got the same colours applied as the basin. Not spectacular but it's quite weird to paint a mini in monochrome green and white.
And as always with metal miniatures, once you started to paint, you'll find mold lines (-;

There are two options: Remove them or remove them. Right, It'll scratch some of your paint of, but if you don’t, I'll promise, it will always directly jump in your vision.

Fix what you don’t like

As everything came together slowly I had a thorough look on what doesn’t work for me.

1. The socket missed plant and colour variation
2. The mini didn't fit to the "stone" in the basin
3. The water looked like - well, at least not like water to stay polite.
4. The wild color mix on the backdrop took focus from the mini

To tackle the first, point a string of Ivy was added to the base even before the mini was glued. I took a string of paper Ivy from AK, coloured it with greens and browns and glued it to the base.

Since the paper string doesn’t look really authentic, I took a string of a root and glued it on top of the Ivy to hide that paper look.

Actually the socket and the mini appeared quite disconnected. The elve stands on round stones and the socket has rough flat edges. Nothing milliput can't solve, but also another chance to ruin the Paintjob again - which fortunately wasn't the case - and a commitment to glue everything together.

Now point three, the water, that was tricky. I was frustrated because the first result was so bad.
Then I did search for reference photos and there is a mandatory aspect missing in my water. The sky.
The surface is always perpendicular to the sky and reflects it, in contrast with quite dark parts for trees and shadows.
Easy - More bright blue, less unpleasant browns.
There were constant slight updates till the end of the whole thing, but this was the major "Aha" moment.

And finally the backdrop. I liked it a lot and didn’t want to change it drastically. Now what is causing the statue to lose it’s focus? I think it’s not the colors but the bright colours right behind her. They are close in value to the white of the mini and let her bleed into the backdrop. Fixing that with bright green was a minimally invasive procedure and improved the composition notably.

Close to the end

Closer to the end I usually get more afraid to change things - probably like most painters. That’s why I nowadays often use my android tablet to digitally paint what I would change. And now we are talking about the weathering.
The references showed dark spots on the weathered sides, yellow to oranges, lichens, rust, cracks and lots of dark moss. All doable but also “overdoable”. With a sketch on the tablet I felt way more comfortable to start.

Splish splash

I had several projects created with water splashes already. There is a great tutorial from Cult of paint. Some wool, a container and gloss varnish. Then you paint the varnish layer by layer over parts of the spread out wool and after 3-5 layers you see splashes that you can cut out.

These splashes have quite some wool hair left over which I very carefully try to melt with the flame of a lighter.
For the streams I used nylon string coated with satin varnish. Satin appears a bit more milky, not mat and not too glossy - perfect for water streams. Also here: multiple coats and it’s done in 3-5 iterations.
These streams could easily be cut ( better longer than too short ) and glued to the tiny nozzles.

Final touches

When the project enters the final phase I jump from A to B and it is hard to document that in a structured fashion so don’t get confused:
With the streams glued to the nozzles ( and not yet to the statue ) the moss was added, a mixture of foam glue and paint, directly applied with a brush.

Once dried it was stippling time: Small brush and yellow to orange for the Lichens and greys for the general weathering. Also the first streams were cut to size and glued onto the statue.

The water is getting more refined too. I painted some grays in the water to show the statue being reflected.
The fountain hose was changed from grey to a turquoise. You find that color found in some old fountains and it just fits better than the characterless gray.
With the project getting that close to be finished it is time to glue remaining things. I glued the streams to the statue and also the tiny little splash fragments from the wool to the point where the streams hit the statue.
Final steps are a heavy load of dirty down moss and rust - I think I went a bit too far here - and more color where the water hits the statue.

If you have a second look at the very first inspiration picture, you can see quite some color changes around the splashes. The spots at which water constantly splashes to the statue have a washed outcolor, framed by a dark line. That's a very interesitng colour shift and I tried to paint that on the statue too.

Final pictures and aftermath

A great project that was done quite fast with ~15 hours. I think the rust is a bit too much in the end, and I regret that I didn’t add a snail. An idea from the very beginning - a snail with colorfull slime. But I couldn’t create a piece of milliput that was small enough without looking like dog poo.

Now if you wanna know how that thing was build have a read here .