SBS: The ugly truth

Hello Jungle,

Today I present you a small SbS to a waterbase I made recently.
First I want to say a few words about why I created this little scene.

I am almost sure you stumbled over a video of a seaturtle that is traped in some kinde of waste or seen photos of countless pieces of trash swimming in the ocean. The fact is that aproximately 1.4 billion pounds of trash produced by humans ending up in the ocean. All these videos made me rethink a lot of actions left me shoked and sad. My miniature project often reflecting things that i carry arround with me and bcause this topic made me think a lot it is not a surprice I created this piece.

The storry should be straight forward two tiny paperboats on a waste poluted ocean. The paperboats in different sizes are representing different generations in this particular scene.

So I started to gather suplies. I dont wanted to just making trash out of materials I allready had in my hobby material boxes at home. This trash should be real trash, as a boyscout leader I am in nature almost every second weekend of the year so I decided to not only clean my natural suroundings (even more then I usualy do when I am out in the forest) but also bring some of the trash I found out there back home with me. This task was almost to easy sadly. I let the pictures speak for themself :

After collecting a good bag full of trash I putt al that stuff into the freezer to kill at least some of the bacteria. Out of the freezer ontu my bench, I chopped everithing up in little pieces and put it together with my allready mixed up 2 conponment resin in the premade mold.

Do you want to know more about working with that kind of resin?

This step was quite difficoult as I tried to let all pieces float on the surface as they would normaly do in water, but as some parts where heavyer then others I had to stack them somehow on each other. Luckily my resin has a long curing time so I had enought time to stack my trash .

After the resin cured I put all together on a woden plinth and sanded the top part flat. I usualy start with a 120 grit sandpaper and go up to 4000 grit. From 1000 on I normaly wetsanding my resin projects this helps to not clogg the sandingpaper and it also catches most of the resin dust. 

Always wear safety gear while sanding 

On the nice and flat surface I was now able to create some waves. I did this by applying a clear drying acrylic gel. These are the ones I use the most #1 #2. That step takes a little while as you have to apply it in several layers otherwise the gel will dry cloudy. 

To finish off the waves I mixed some  white into the acrylic gel to get a nice transparent white to simulate foam. A way to increase contrast and drama on a wavy surface like this is to actually paint the recesses between the waves darker. I did this by using this brand of colours by pebeo. You could use any slightly tranclucent colour for this step. 

The paperboats are folded like you would fold one out of a A4 sheet of paper. Just cut the scaled down size of an A4 sheet out of cigarette paper get some clean nice tweezers out and take your time. I glued them down by applying a small amount of the acrylic gel on the bottom and place them on the waves. Some edge highlights carefully painted on gives them a bit more definition.

After all this project was an emotional ride for me somehow. I often looked back on my projects and see things that are reflecting my feelings about certain things. To create a little scene often helps me to clear my thoughts. I hope this little insight was interesting for you guys.

Till next time

Josua