Let It Slush
5 SEPTEMBER 2013
For a while, I feared I might have over-committed myself when I chose to model the Jersey City Industrial in winter. And not just your typical fresh white fluffy kind, either, but rather the week-old slushy, grimy kind. Ordinary snow is notoriously hard to model as it is, so I'd set myself up for a serious challenge.
Then, quite unexpectedly, I had one of those classic ah-hah! moments, where the flashbulb that went off in my head created a glimmer of hope. I was cutting out a slice of the layout base in order to model a foundation with no building, and the Gatorfoam was being a bit stubborn—I had to dig the last remaining bits of the foam core out with my fingernail. Wait a second...
There in my hand was something remarkable: piles of half-melted snow. At that moment I dropped everything and gathered up a few items: a piece of brick wall, some scored sheet styrene, the roof part of some Cornerstone kit, and an NZT fire hydrant. At my workbench, I glued the scrap of brick wall vertically to the roof part. After sanding the roof surface to give it some street texture, I cut a length of scored styrene to make a sidewalk.
Next, I grabbed a couple of bottles of paint: Boxcar Red for brick, and Concrete for the sidewalk, as well as some India ink wash. When the sidewalk was dry, I hit it with ink wash, then rubbed it down with alcohol, and applied some thinned Concrete to the brick wall for mortar. Finally, I installed the fire hydrant.
Then came the exciting part. I de-laminated a small chunk of Gatorfoam to extract the foam, and carefully sliced a wedge-shaped sliver to run along the base of the wall. A little white glue held it in place while I teased some Liquitex Heavy Gloss Gel along the edge of the foam where it met the sidewalk, then dabbed a layer of gel on the rest of the sidewalk. So far, so good!
Bolstered by my initial success, I started chopping and tearing at pieces of foam until I obtained some half-melted lumpy forms, then glued these pieces to the edge of the sidewalk. I found that I could pick and punch the material with a tweezers until the shapes were just right—I could even make slushy paths through the snow piles where pedestrians had trodden. Then I applied more gel to blend things together, add highlights, and create slush on the street.
Finally, the finishing touch: grunge. I simply brushed small amounts of India ink wash along the bottom edges of the piles, and allowed capillary action to draw it up a little and make irregular blotches of grime. To simulate the dirt that gets scraped up off the street and onto the snow piles, I lightly dry-brushed a little more ink wash on the foam here and there; the irregular surface picked up flecks of ink to perfectly create the effect I wanted.
It was quite a thrill to have a random discovery actually work, and to meet—even exceed—my expectations, on my first try no less. I now have every confidence that I’ll be able to obtain the precise effect I want to create for the JCIR. It's a good feeling.