I am building a model of a 1/48 scale aircraft for a friend based on a photograph, no problem except the aircraft is pictured parked on a concrete hard standing shortly after a heavy shower of rain. Fortunately the picture was under clouds so I don’t need to worry about reflections.
Unfortunately I can’t post the whole picture on-line but this is the section I’m hoping to replicate:
However, I’m not sure what the best way of representing the wet concrete and puddles is: the obvious solution is a heavy overspray of gloss or semi-gloss varnish but I’m not sure if that would give the most lifelike solution or whether anyone can offer a smarter alterative.
Would you be able to share the photo with us? That way the brains trust can offer a more accurate suggestion. For mine (and I’m not part of the brains trust!) it would depend on whether it is puddles or just wet concrete. Wet concrete = darker shading concrete colour but puddles = mix of darker shading and maybe some resin or other model water product. AK Interactive has puddle products for muddy or cleaner puddles, or something like in the link below;
You can give the base a gloss spray, which will darken/enrich the paint. But first I’d be tempted to apply tape masks in strategic spots to represent equipment that had been parked during the storm, and then moved off leaving dry patches! Then I’d add some clear gloss with a paintbrush in any recesses such as the joints between slabs, where water would puddle.
I’ve never tried it, but (incorporating the suggestions of my learned friends above) I imagine success or failure lies in the concrete surface. It can’t be smooth, but both subtle-y and obviously ridged, assuming it was laid in squarish slabs. In other words textured in a way surface “water” can naturally pool & collect. Then I might try trailing (with a soft brush) PVA glue of differing dilutions over the surface, one layer at a time, letting it pool, and then use a hair-drier to “fix” & speed up the applications.
It may well be necessary to tint the PVA with a trace of black, so that all the application(s) stain the concrete a darker colour whether they’re shiny or not. The thickest application obviously needs to be shiny.
But I’d sure want to test the theory on something that doesn’t matter first.
Varnish alone will not make a good effect, in my opinion. If concrete is just soaked, as Sam pointed, it is not gloss but darker.
And if it has formed puddles, they should be completely flat because water fills any irregularity and levels the surface -which varnish does not.
I think you should either level and polish the surface first, and then use varnish, or use an specific product that can do that at once -and not being too thick to raise over the surface
Consider that the main difference between the dry and wet concrete is that the colors on the wet concrete are more intense and (literally!) saturated. So, I’d start with darker and more saturated base colors.
Next, I think the key to realism on something wetted like this pavement is that - unless the rain is still falling - it displays varying degrees of sheen in different places, so I’d try to replicate this.
So, to vary the sheen on the darker colored concrete, I might start off with an overall coating of a satin clear sprayed on or perhaps building it up along the expansion cracks allowing some of the very centers of some panels untouched.
I’d follow this up with BRUSH painting thin layers of a gloss clear perhaps going from the centers of the individual panels to towards the expansion cracks (leaving most of the centers untouched). I’d build up these layers by brushing each subsequent coat so that I move its starting edge closer and closer to the expansion cracks creating the “shiny” wet areas in and along the expansion cracks.
A couple of small puddles could be added by “dabbing” or “dripping” straight clear gloss here and there, but I’d avoid creating too many of these, perhaps mostly just along the expansion cracks and their intersections (assuming that the concrete aprons were poured relatively flat with a crowned area in the center and a slight (probably undetectable in this scale) slope towards the edges for drainage.
So, water would tend to run off towards the edges when the rain was actually falling, but once it stopped, any standing water would follow the expansion cracks towards the edges of the apron. If you model the apron with any grass border, I’d make that edge of the apron look the wettest right along the grass border.
I have yet to see the ideal concrete job, spec’s are one thing, actual concrete may not always be the ideal implementation of the spec’s.
I once had to shovel water uphill on a bathroom floor to get it into the floor drain …
I googled for images using the search words: rainy airfield apron
