How did you do the sea? 

This is what you can get asked as soon as you show your latest build featuring some boat.  And you find that just shrugging and saying to use X brand of interior decorating filler, and with no further comment makes you no friends.    I’m not really a fan of modellers who like to keep their techniques a ‘secret’, but they are free to do that obviously, but I have always considered modelling to be an open-source type of activity.  Start by looking at the dioramas you admire.  Modellers such as Mike McCabe, Per Olav Lund, Chloe Palttner, Roy Sutherland, Ian Ruscoe and Werner De Keesmaeker all formed my inspiration, but in the end, the late great Shep Paine, described a repeatable technique many years ago.

It’s not rocket surgery, I mean it can’t be, as I’ve done it!  But it is about detailed observation of everyday things you take totally for granted.  I do admit a bit of context here though.  I am a keen sailor of fast-catamarans and an RYA Rescue Coxswain, so you tend to take notice of what is happening waterwise, and this helps me lose races more effectively…   

The dull theory bit.

On big bodies of water and sea in particular, we will have 3 parts or elements: the swell, the local wind waves and the vessel wake. If it’s a proper big ocean, you may well have a swell that underlies the actual waves you notice.  These are the big surface height changes that you need think about first on your sae base. A height of a metre or two with an amplitude of some 8m or so would not be abnormal. These big waves are usually born thousands of miles away in big storms on the middle of oceans and just roll across. But if your scene is set in shallower water, say the North Sea, then a shorter and sharper chop could be expected as the seabed interferes with the big waves and reflects them back up.  

The second element is the local surface-wind waves.  Usually, these will go in the direction that the wind is going and will have a much shorter wavelength and height variation. Of course, if the wind has changed direction significantly, it’ll get a really messy.  In anything over a force 3 (7-10 knots) the crests of a few waves will blow off and break, always DOWNWIND.  See https://www.weather.gov/pqr/beaufort   But this will initially be occasional and scattered at that windspeed.  The stronger the wind, the more ‘White Horses’, but don’t go mad with these, less is more here. The other type of wave break is cause by the shore when then whole wave arrives, so the break then is much longer as the whole wave falls over.  This surfing type wave is only relevant to beaching craft for our purposes.  

And over all that is the actual boat’s wake, and this also comes in two parts. The standing wave and the breaking wave component. Both reflect the vessel’s hull shape and will be affected by the wind wave conditions too.  However, wakes all conform to a set of rules that are constant throughout the universe, that constant is the Wake Angle.  Many years ago, in 1887, Lord Kelvin, the esteemed Mathematician and physicist (Not to be confused with Lord Kevin, of course, who is the Town Clark in Lytham St Annes),  hypothesised that all bodies moving through fluids did so creating a wake that is 19.47 degrees from the direction of travel.  So, a duck, a supertanker, Sailrocket or Bluebird K7 are the same in that respect.  Check next time. If you make it something other than19 or so degrees, it will look very odd although you may not realise why.  That wake will break as a beach wave does, but gradually fades out as the boat passes, about a boat length behind.  Within that is a turbulent zone.  This is often characterised by a flatter water area, as the water displaced by the bow wave flows back.  This will have lots of bubbles rising to the surface.  The effect is, rather than a sheet of foam, they quickly start to form into almost geometric polygonal shapes, with the centre fee of the bubbles.  These will be along the side of the vessel as it passes.  You will then usually get a second wake wave; is the thing is not a planning hull going fast.  This is a mini version of the first and is at a parallel angle.  Finally, you have the stern wave.  This is often a little back from the stern as the water recovers from the hull passing.  Within this, and starting a couple of metres or so aft, will be the prop wash turbulence.  Often a distinct lighter line, coming back from each propellor shaft and being left in the water for a good way behind.

The Modelling art

I like to begin by usually buying a base first.  These are available from numerous retailers, but you need one to fit the model obviously, but don’t go too small, the wake of the thing you are modelling is a large part, so account for this, and thus it’s usually best to err on the larger side if you want any impact.  I tend to use bases made by Buco from Hungary http://bucomodelbase.com, and these they all come with a nice, fitted foam insert as well.  I found them at the SMC show, the prices were nice and got a few there for future projects.  Now I’m locked into them, as I need all my NeOmega display bases to match. I then get the Perspex lids custom made to fit by www.visualimpact.org.uk.

 Next, you’ll need to get a sheet of blue or pink insulating foam, if it’s not with the base.  This stuff is found in builder’s merchants and in various thicknesses.  I favour 25mm thick.  This allows for carving a decent hull aperture if you have a full hull model.

The foam is trimmed to fit into/onto the base material, then the planning starts.  Think lots.  Make rough drawings of where things, like buoys or other details will go.  Work out what angle the boat needs to be at.  Try to go off centre and not parallel to the sides, as this looks too regimented and odd.  It needs to be a snapshot.  Maybe use the rule of thirds, the classical art/photography rule, whereby the subject is rarely bang in the middle of the piece – think Turner’s ‘Fighting Temarare’ for example.  Decide where the wind is coming from and at what strength, as this dramatically effects the wave pattern over the scene.  A boat travelling into the wind has a significantly different wave look to one going down or crosswind.  With Lord Kelvin in mind, draw the 19 deg wake angle first as everything caused by the boat will be withing that pie slice.  Constantly look at your references of similar boats. 

Now, that technique I mentioned earlier.  Aluminium foil is the medium.  It is easy to create a great sea effect in a short time.  First, with your hull hole removed and line drawn on for waves and wake, paint it all over with a coat of cheap PVA glue.  This is a primer, and the subsequent glue sticks well to it.  Take strips of foil and roll them onto long sausage shapes of slightly differing thicknesses.  Flatten them down a little, depending on how big your waves are. Then glue these sea waves onto the base using the lines you drew as a guide.  The waves should be approximately even spaced apart, but not all the same heights.  Make smaller shorter sausages to go occasionally between them.  When happy, make the wake waves in the same manner and glue these over the sea waves.  Next, give the whole lot a coat of PVA and cover it all with one sheet of foil, carefully pressing down as not to tear it, but over the peaks and troughs.  You can adjust the wave heights slightly then too.  When happy, paint overall with more PVA and leave to dry.  If you feel the waves look too sharp, add another sheet of foil, and another PVA coat.  Once dry, trim the boat hole and the edges.  You should be able to carefully sand these edges square for neatness.  Give it a coat of matt white primer and you have your sea canvass ready.

Painting

The colour will obviously depend on where your scene is set.  Deep blue pacific, the tropics or in the Med, a cold blue grey for the North Atlantic, or just that cold grey muddy green of the North Sea. I start by giving the whole thing a coat of an ocean grey colour or a blue grey depending on the geography as a base coat.    Once dry, I then choose the two colours I need for the actual colour.  These should be the same hue, but different in tone, usually lighter so you can get a shaded effect.  Spray one colour from your base downwind direction at about a 30-40 degree angle to the horizontal to catch the highlights of that direction, and then spray the other from the opposite way.  This should create the start of a differential colour pattern found on real sea and start to highlight the wave pattern.  You can spray some streaks of either colour in smaller patches, and sometimes lengthways down waves etc to create a variation.  Maybe paint on bits of seaweed, or brown patches where an old oil spill happened.  Just keep going until you are happy. If not, just start over again.  I find all seas I make never turn out exactly as I originally envisage them to.  Frequently things happen accidentally that suddenly make it look better, so don’t get too hung up on it too early.  Art is about process in this case.

Next, you need to spray the underwater wake area.  As the boat goes, it will create millions of bubbles around it and leaving a trail of them for some distance, that spread sideways and fade away after the boat has passed as we said earlier.  Take your light base colour and lighten it further.  Spray this around the hole the boat will sit in and then behind it as the wake.  You need to look again at the wake behind a boat as look at the prop wake marks.  You’ll see there will be a lighter line back from each prop that started deep from it but rises to the surface some way behind.  The faster the boat, the further aft of the hull this will happen, so don’t start that line right on behind the stern, leave a distance as appropriate to the speed it’s traveling. Gradually build up this lightened area, letting it get fainter as it spreads away from the hull sides and the edges of the wake area.

Now I give it a brush coat of AK Water Gel.  This is an acrylic medium, that looks like thickened PVA glue.  It is available in Pacific Blue, Atlantic Blue and Clear, and can be tinted with AK acrylic paints if needed. The blues are very BLUE I found, too much so for what I wanted, so I go for the clear.  Brush it on, with and wide brush, a coat with the brushstrokes parallel with the waves, i.e. 90 deg. to your wind direction to make your wavelets. Don’t try to smooth it out, with no brush streaks though.  The stuff is white but dries clear, so you want those streaks.  Do it in short overlapping strokes.  It will dry overnight.  Look at it then against the light and decide if you need more texture, and where.  If so, I usually use a wide flat brush, about 10mm long, and stipple more gel on, again 90 deg to the wind direction.  Once dry, it is given a further coat of a clear acrylic varnish for that water gloss effect, and to create more sense of depth.  Let it dry properly.  AK also make two other water modelling products.  Water Effects, a thickened version of the gel which dries a semi-transparent white, and Water Foam, an even thicker version, which will remain white, and I will use both.

Then we mount the model. By this time it is 90% finished, and matt varnished.  I complete the rigging after it’s on the base, and add the flags etc.  Brush the varnish around the inside of that accurate hole you cut, then position your now pretty-well finished and painted piece.  The model is then glued in with more varnish brushed carefully around the joint before leaving to set. Fill any gaps with more varnish and water effects.

So now we come to a fun part, in my opinion.  The water at the  front of a boat with a bow this shape will sheer cleanly and be pushed up the sides until gravity takes over and is falls back into the  wake wave.  It doesn’t foam at this point, only at the point it starts to fall back, so that is where you add a tiny bit of the foam effect, around the edge of this area. To create the effect of the water being thrown away in a curve, get a piece of tissue paper, cut to a semi-circular shape and lay it on a glass sheet, or a plate.  Gently soat and stipple a little of the clear varnish onto it and leave it a short while.  Then peel it odd with a scalpel blade and apply it to the bow where the water starts to fall away, and curve it into an arc. When dry and you are happy, add more foam at this part using your photo references as a guide.  Continue adding the foam effects along the crest of the wake, varying the effect behind the wave but keeping the front edge, the away direction, as a hard edge as the wave crests. 

When you finish adding the wave crests, use slightly thinned white paint and carefully stipple those polyhedron shapes into the flat water along the hull sides.  You could airbrush these, but in reality, they are a more hard-edge look.  But you can airbrush streaks and spots in the wake area too.  After I finish, I tend not to gloss coat the water.  The foam looks far better as a matt finish as making it gloss renders it a sort of porcelain effect and rather unrealistic. 

Now just add those seagulls and they’ll always appear whenever you get a bag of chips!