I saved my own skin, to a degree!

My friends, let me start by saying that the vignette is finished! And I'm gonna call it "Gone Fishing" :) 

The resin situation from my last post remained strange, but solvable to an extent. Thanks to all of you who contributed with your own experiences, it's a worthy read! 

Basically, I ran out of patience right after I dropped you an update, and decided to solve the problem, whatever the solution might be. I found out by poking the tape that the resin below the surface was hard. So I tried carefully peeling off a small portion of the tape and you wouldn't believe it - it was as if the curing resin pushed the badly mixed resin to the surface! Basically, everything below surface level was rock hard and only the raised "lips" that are formed when resin dries and contracts were runny. The tape essentially removed all of them, and instead of a raised lip that I'd have to scrape off with a blade, I was left with the opposite - a slight downward curve around the edge. Not perfect, as you can see, because it's still visible even with the water ripples, but not awful if we consider what was at stake here! 

I covered the entire surface with multiple layers of Water Gel from AK. The first layer pretty much had to cover the sticky areas, and the remaining ones were used to create ripples. Sadly, some of this tacky resin collected around the turret, and here it was impossible to cover up with water gel. It's as if the gel got absorbed by the mushy mess... so yeah, those areas are still runny and sticky. They'll probably remain that way forever, and it'll be a wonderful dust collector, but whatever... you know, at the end of the day, it's better to mess up with a palette cleanser project... if this happened with a 30x30cm diorama with 200€ worth of kit, aftermarket, and figures, and 2 months of work, I'd be quite sad. With this, it's a good learning experience! And a great exercise in trying to unf*ck your own sh*t, as folks from SMCG would say :D 

Another small addition was water foam made from Water Gel Effects from AK, and this was applied around rocks, roots, and the turret. It's quite subtle, but I like it! Some leaves were glued to the water surface with water gel, and I finished the figure. Here I tried to be more restrained with shadows on the face, and I think it makes the comrade look younger. 

Well, it's a great way to start the weekend! Gotta put the video together, and then we're off to a new project!