Wednesday, February 27, 2019

Ground foam at Haskell

I've only had a small amount of time to work on the layout thanks to taxes and the weather, but I did manage to get some base scenery applied using some of the ground foam I recently acquired.

First I cleared off the area again.



Using Mod Podge thinned with water 50/50, I applied it with a 1" foam brush within a few inches of the ballast, as well as getting some on the lower portions of the ballast shoulder and then used a kitchen sieve and sprinkled a good layer of the Earth blend over the glued areas.





Once it was dry I vacuumed the excess up and reclaimed it to use later.






I repeated this process for the Turf blend.  I made sure the glue mixture partially overlapped the Earth blend and proceeded to cover the rest of the areas as well.  After letting it dry as before I again used the vacuum to reclaim the excess Turf blend.




Next I came back with an assorted variety of colors and coarser ground foam to give a little more flavor and texture. I sprinkled this with my fingers and tried to blend the two previous layers of Turf and Earth.   This was then sprayed with 70% alcohol to wet it before applying more Mod Podge thinned to a 3:1 ratio. 





The dark ground cover is dried, crushed leaves, I plan to plant a batch of trees in this location.  I've read and seen how others have used this method to represent the ground cover under the trees.  

I'm far from done with this scene, once I get all of this base down I'll come back with some static grass to add some depth and color, then some trees.  

It feels good to get some scenery down again.




 

4 comments:

  1. Looking very good Allen. If you are tea drinkers try drying the tea leaves and sprinkling those under your trees also. They look good under pines etc.and are a good size for N Scale. I have just saved heaps of them for whenever my scenery gets started. We are having an unseasonable heat wave here, 38C Thursday, yesterday and again today. Stops any work in the train room.

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    1. Thanks Rod. Several others on the forums have told me to do the same. I don't drink a lot of tea, but I have some and will try it. The leaves that I used are ones a buddy and I ground up several years ago and forgot until I dug stuff out recently. They might need to be finer? Should I use more?

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  2. We use tea bags and they seem to be finer that the regular stuff (probably sweepings off the floor haha). I Just put them out in the sun and let them dry then cut open the bags.

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