Thursday, December 27, 2012

Scenery at last

I hope everyone had a great Christmas and that the New Year will be a great one.
 

There hasn't been a lot happening on the Bogong & Geehi for the last 6 weeks as we have been busy harvesting on the farm. It was a successful harvest and we finished on the Friday before Christmas. It is always good to be finished before the festive season and after a few days catching up on some sleep I decided to venture out into the shed and do some modelling.

I have been busting to do some scenic work to try and remove the snowstorm look that most of the layout has. The first thing I do is cover the foam with several layers of chux wipes soaked in white glue diluted with water.
 
 
Once that has dried I have been using "mud" which is something that American modeller Mike Confalone uses on his layout showcased in model-railroad-hobbyist magazine. He has a multi part article about building his layout starting in the April 2012 issue which can be downloaded from the website.
 
 
Mike makes his mud mixing Celluclay ( a dried paper mache product) mixed with acrylic house paint and a little water. Mud is a very appropriate name as that is what it looks like. It is very good for filling holes and generally looking like soil. It is surprising how far a small mix will cover and it dries to a very hard and strong surface. While it's still wet I sift on a light coat of dry grout to make the surface look even more like soil.
 

 
 
After all that had dried I just had to get out my Noch grass master and apply some static grass. I use fibres from both Heki and Silhouette. I only did a small area as I wanted to check that my technique still worked. I used white glue which has left a shiny sheen when it dried, so I will be trying matte medium next time. On my first patch I put down the static grass first and then tried adding silhouette flowers to represent Paterson's curse and grass tufts. With the static grass already down the tufts had trouble touching the ground so I tried putting the tufts and flowers on first and then adding the static grass which I think is more successful. Looking at the photos I think I need to add something like a little ground foam to represent broadleaved plants