applied with a very few loaded brush and carefully blend one on another. (pic 32)
Sometimes to get some special effect, I just paint the surface with water, and add some paint on the wet area. I added all the black run offs this way, which allowed them to really blend efficiently with the surrounding colours, and yet to stand out. (pic 33)
Then  I added my usual kind of rust: the first is a diluted mix between black and burnt sienna acrylic paint. I paint the rusted areas and then I add some pigments (mixes between red, black, burnt sienna and yellow) on the still wet area. This technique is really great to get a real feeling of rust as the pigments will stay darker if the paint underneath was wet enough to go through the pigments layer, or, on the contrary, if the diluted paint you applied first just acted like some contact glue to the pigments where they retain some grainy texture and their initial colour. (pic 34)
But now i was a bit worried of something: rust really stands out well on some light colour, but how does it look like on dark colours.
I was precisely thinking of this while walking in the street when my eyes came to rest on a green portal, a very rusted green portal. I noticed that the paint near the places where the rust settles gets discoloured pretty fast. Okay then, I took back all my work and proceeded to add some kind of clear dull transition between normal paint and rusted parts.  (pic 35)
The keys to the present are in the past and etc.
I was recently cursing against some of my friends because they were turning back to childhood (and bloody registered trademarks) by painting some Citadel figs when I reminded something in their range of products which was quite cool indeed.
It was their inks.
Those are some transparent liquids filled with pigments that you can’t wash under a tap like you could do with normal inks.
All the Citadel figs i ever painted where painted with inks and I remembered loving the stuff. So I bought most of the colours available and proceeded to screen the whole of the high highlight  areas of the Sokol with much diluted yellow ink with a tiny drop of green added in the mix. It works fantastically, adding a slight glow from inside to the whole colour.
Since then, I try not to set ablaze my friends whenever I see them painting Citadel figures anymore.

Now I often notice that whenever diorama makers try to paint groundwork they can be very bad at varying the green shades they use. Take a landscape picture at random and you will see that the groundwork is not only “brown”, “grey”, “green”, but of an infinity of different shades of each of those colours.
So i tried to make sure that my own groundwork would not be of the same shade of green as the Sokol for starters.
So I sprayed the whole with a dark green kind of colour and proceeded to paint each leaves of each plants individually by ever so slightly changing the colour mix. Of course I used my Citadel inks quite often to get a very fluid screen on some special standout leaves.
Of course I didn’t care much about the direction of light at all at this stage, as it would be impossible to specify anything until those numerous ferns were not planted.
The water lilies were painted almost entirely with inks using a mix of brown yellow and green and light green acrylic paint. As for the twigs and dead trees, I had the idea of painting them completely white as it’s often the case in marshes where the bark falls out to reveal only the clear tints of the wood. But when I dry fitted the diorama, I observed that the white was standing out too much, so I painted it in a mix of Van Dyk brown pigments and diluted black paint, as well as a mix of Citadel brown and chestnut inks for the upper stems. (pic 36)

Assembling the different bits together –the water.

So now everything was painted, I had to start thinking of building the base that would eventually be drowned in the water.
I fixed the underwater part of the Sokol on a glass sheet of the diorama’s dimension, and made a mix of plaster, twigs and moss that I applied on the right corners of the diorama according top the view I thought would be the best. I embedded some further twigs and moss at this stage, and also glued the water lilies roots which started to pop out of the scene, way above the underwater part for a special effect I wanted to create. (pic 37)
I built some glass walls to be sure that I would always be able to control the level of transparency of the mix while making sure those walls would be completely waterproof. I started to pour an opaque dark blue green mix on the bottom of the diorama. As every surface of the bottom would be far from being covered with groundwork, this first coat was used as some kind of colour sealer.
Then I poured several other coats of slightly tinted resin, including a few of them which were more opaque and very blue on the left edges of the diorama, far from the groundcover which would add to a feeling of deepness of the water as you get more far from the river banks and would also lead the whole to be very good looking. (pic 38 -39)

Okay I only had a few millimetres left to end up the water, and this was nowhere close of getting any kind of flat. So I wiped out my glass walls and fixed some light wooden ones which would be stronger and easier to fix with some industrial strength clamps, and I set them up to the level of the top of the immerged part of the Sokol. I then poured one last coat of untainted resin and pressed on the top of the resin covered Sokol a greased glass part. As I had poured a very generous coat of resin, it started to overflow everywhere on the wooden walls. Well, no problem at least the resin wouldn’t be able to retract as I managed to fix the glass top with some other clamps until the resin finally set. (pic 40)