Geyser Gulch Refurb | Workbench Wednesday

[Music] Howdy Folks Dave here at Thunder Mesa Studio on a workbench Wednesday hope you're having a great day wherever and whenever you happen to be watching this it's kind of a cold wet rainy day here in Jerome got up here didn't feel really motivated to start any new projects today so I thought I do a little bit of Maintenance kind of a good day for that as you may know I've been uh refurbishing and reimagining the Thunder Mesa layout and as part of that process I'm uh doing some cleaning and uh you know revamping of old scenes as I go and today I think I want to do some work on Geyser Gulch which hasn't had any attention in quite some time and it's starting to show its its age a little bit a little bit of wear and tear starting to show so let's go over there and uh take a look when you have a lot of big modeling projects like this there's always something that needs attention something that needs to be repaired or cleaned or maintained in some way and I was looking here at uh at geyser Gulch the other day noticing it was kind of looking a little dingy a little yellow in fact like some of the color was kind of starting to shift towards the yellow side with age and uh I think I want to uh to fix that today I'm going to start we doing a good cleaning because boy is this Dusty first I'll give it a once over with the shop [Music] [Music] back this whole scene was modeled with with uh you know layers of paper and foam board and acrylic modeling paste and acrylic paint and then the the shine of the water that you see there is actually a two-part epoxy resin poured over the top and then some Mod Podge stippled on on top of that to give some some surface ripples to the water and it's you can probably see it started to Yellow a little bit so I'm going to try to bring this back to a more uh as new as modeled appearance just getting this clean is going to help a lot I think right now I've got a container with some just some clear water a clean soft brush trying and get the rest of this dust off I'm not worried about hurting any of this surface um with the water even though it is you know modeled with you know paper mostly because you know it's got those layers of resin on top of it yeah that water coming off there is it's just it's kind of brown now this might have to do a couple of passes on this now I'll just Pat all this dry with a paper towel and uh go over it again color of this water by the way this turquoise is based on uh couple of real world places one of them right here in the southwest not very far away from where I am here in Jerome up at the Grand Canyon it's a place called Havasupai and the water looks very much like this it's loaded with travertine dissolved in the water another place uh that this scene is heavily based on is Mammoth Hot Springs which is up in Yellowstone National Park now we're want to do something about this yellowing I'm going to dry brush some white and some unbleached Titanium on here in different areas it is supposed to be sort of yellow I mean that was intentional when the travertin drives out it tends to get kind of that you know chalky khaky kind of to it but it's got a little bit more yellow than I want it to be so we're going to bring it back I just squeeze those colors out into a a dish like this dip my brush in there and dip my brush in each one so I get kind of halfway between the two if you start in with just pure bright white uh it doesn't give you anywhere to go you can't get any whiter than bright white so start with kind of a a medium White kind of an antique white a piece of cardboard and get most of that paint off of the brush I'll start up here at the top just dry brushing on trying not to hit the pools but just the uh the travertine Ledges if I do accidentally get it on the pools I can just wipe it off real quick with a wet finger just trying to bring this all back up about a shade just it's gotten a little bit dark and dingy carry that over onto the rock surface because the travertine stains the Red Rock as well using a semi-stiff brush with a long handle this is actually an oil painting brush so I can get down into these places that are kind of hard to reach you don't want want to forget these pools over here now I want to mix my paint with a little bit more white than I did before still dry brushing use a smaller brush come back and highlight certain areas the top of the geyser there needs to be almost pure white just gradually working my way up all the way to Pure White adding a little bit more white in with each pass till I get to the brightest highlight which I want to put right on this right on the edges here I want to bring some of that mineral staining up onto the Rocks too refresh that right where the water meets the edge of the rock it's going to be white with travertine also now I want to give all that paint a chance to dry for a few minutes and while I do I'm going to punch up the look of rust on the rails here on the on the Trestle using some of my pan pastels first I'll use the dark red Brown just hit these sides of the rails and the rail spikes make sure I get both sides of each rail now I'll come back with the brighter orange shade in just a few spots now the speed limit is 5 miles an hour on this Trestle so slow moving trains are going to drop a lot of soot and Cinders and Ash so got some black chalk right down the middle between the rails I'll put a very light spray of matte finish on there I'll take one of my track cleaners dipped in a little bit of mineral spirits get all of The Pastels and shock and fixative off the top of those rails my preferred track cleaner by the way this is a a wine cork with a piece of uh cotton t-shirt wrapped around it now that the paint and everything else is dry uh I want to come back and punch up the surface of the water it's gotten kind of dull over time you know the paint yellows and the the water surface just kind of gets dull that Mod Podge will collect dust and get darker and duller over time so I want to bring that shine back and for that I'm going to use some Woodland scenix realistic water uh I don't really like this stuff that much for modeling large bodies of water ponds and streams and things like that but for applications like this it's great and I just like to apply it with a small soft brush just Porsche some of it out in a clean dish brush it on every place I want it to be shiny stuff smells an awful lot like uh floor wax and I wouldn't be at all surprised if that's what it is now on these travertine pools there are some places where the water will run down and it'll look wet and other places where it used to run down but doesn't anymore and it will look dry so don't want to apply this to every square inch of this just to the tops of the pools and the places where it's likely that the water would be slowly trickling down now I'll let that dry for a little while we'll see how we did while I'm at it I think I'll do some service on the geyser unit also this is the uh vape pen converted to a smoke machine for the geyser it runs on the four AA batteries and I already changed those just adding some fresh Vape fluid nicotine free flavorless let's see how old Unfaithful looks better than [Music] never [Music] well I've got to say that that is a vast Improvement it was definitely worth taking the time to do if I had any power running through the rails right now I'd run a train through here too so we could see how that looks if you're curious about uh guys your Gulch and how I got that geyser to erupt there is a video on that and you can check that out right up here um and look for more small projects like this going forward with the Thunder Mesa layout as I move ahead with the redesign refurbishment reimagining of the layout going to be lots more little tweaks like this going on I want to thank you for joining me for this workbench Wednesday Vlog I hope you enjoyed it if it's your first time here you know subscribe and hit that 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Mesa and see what's new on the Thunder Mesa Studio website at Thunder mesa. Studio as always a huge shout out and thank you to our patreon members for helping to make these videos possible until next time keep moving forward my friends Ros for now