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| A couple of photos "borrowed" from the internet illustrating two key points. First, the similar appearance of the forests and coasts along the U.S. Great Lakes and Norway's Lake Mjoesa (between Oslo and Lillehammer). And second, the dark gray-blue appearance of water. Especially, though not exclusively, on cloudy days. |
Just back yesterday (Saturday afternoon) from time away with the Grand Duchess and Young Master on the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, not far from Lake Superior and the city of Marquette, where we rented a small cabin with a couple of bedrooms, kitchen, and bath on the shore of Shag Lake just outside the village of Gwinn.
A wonderful way to recharge the batteries at summer's midpoint before the inevitable rush toward the start of the fall term/semester at the end of August. My only regret is that we could not stay another week! Beautiful country with plenty of boating, hiking, biking, and skiing possibilities. Plus wildlife. We actually spotted a small bear making his or her way across a quiet highway last Saturday afternoon!
But the point of today's post has to do with my attempts to model water on the tabletop. As some of you might recall, the Young Master and I have a planned refight of the Combat at Zinna coming up (otherwise known as The Battle of Spargelzeit in our world), which features a small river or creek and a rather large pond. Early experiments painting/modelling these water features with a mix of browns and greensbefore our holiday were hit or miss. Some sections looked great, others markedly less so. Sigh.
Well, no great loss besides some time and cheap craft paints and canvases. But, our trip "up north" as they say here in Michigan yielded a possible answer to the conundrum of modelling convincing water features for the tabletop.
The weather for much of our visit was cloudy and cool during the daylight hours, with thunderstorms and heavy rain in the middle of several nights. The point to keep in mind is that the many ponds, streams, rivers, and larger lakes we observed all over the place have a decidedly [dark] gray-blue cast to them when the sun is hidden by clouds.
Parenthetically, many waterfalls too, to the tune of, "Oh look! Another waterfall!" But back to the "color" of water for a moment.
I think the blue water look in many photographs must come from lens filters used by professional photographers, or through digital post-production. Of course, depth of water, whether or not the bottom is visible and what covers it, plus the presence or absence of sunlight also influence how water features appear to our eyes. That and we also tend to think of swimming pools as blue, blue, blue thanks to the tiles and/or paint on their bottoms and sides. In my view, these various factors influence how we envision bodies of water in our minds' eye.
All of which is a remarkably long winded way of saying that I'm headed back to the drawing board to paint up some sample sections of tabletop water using a dark gray-blue high gloss interior latex (emulsion) paint to see how it looks. At any rate, that will provide us with the features we still need to our upcoming game, but I have something more elaborate in mind for down the road based on this video I stumbled across on Youtube a year or so ago by a Swedish model train enthusiast. Have a look at his convincing results here.
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On a completely different note, no trip home would have been complete without a quick stop yesterday at our favorite cross-country ski center -- Forbush Corner -- to pick up a pair of skis, sent from Norway to replace a pair with very slight cosmetic damage.
Which, it turns out, I get to keep! I guess the Norwegians did not want to bother with return postage for a single pair of skis.
So, two pairs of top of the line Madshus racing skis for the price of one. An A pair for the generally good to excellent skiing conditions up north, and a B pair for less than ideal skiing conditions down where we live outside East Lansing.
Here there is less snow, it hangs around for a shorter time, and the grooming, where offered, is less good. That said, it's still fun to get out on some beater skis during a cold day for a few hours of touring the Michigan meadows and woods. We are fortunate to live within easy driving distance (five to 30 minutes) of about half a dozen places that invite area cross-country skiers to enjoy their trail systems during the winter months.
But I digress!
Given the terrain and setting where we spent our vacation, and its similarity to much of inland and coastal Norway, Sweden, and Finland, the ski hand-off yesterday provided a suitably Nordic conclusion to the last couple of weeks.
And now, the overgrown lawn beckons, so it's time for me to hush now, get dressed, brush my teeth, and take care of a few long overdue chores outside before resuming work on the tabletop creek and pond.
-- Stokes
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