Basic Ground Cover
I like to divide the scenery process into steps or phases.. The first step, covered in update #52 is basic land forms (foam profiles, cardboard webbing, rosin paper, plaster cloth & Sculptamold). The second step is basic ground cover. On my layout, about 95% of the basic ground cover is made up using natural materials. Of that, about 70-80% is paving sand from Home Depot. The paving sand, which is crushed rock, is cheap and readily available. The rest is a combination of dirt from my garden, different shades of decomposed granite sourced locally here in Washington State, and left overs from friends. A set of sieves is used to separate finer from courser material. Commercial products from Highball, Scenic Express and Arizona Rock & Mineral make up the balance.
A little fine ground foam is also used when the basic ground cover is applied. These include Woodland Scenics blended turf green, blended turf earth, earth, yellow grass and burnt grass. The idea here is to add just a touch of color.
Basic ground cover.
Getting Started
The ground cover is glued to exposed Sculptamold with a blend of earth colored latex house paint and white glue. The ratio is about 75% paint and 25% white glue. The raw sculptamold is on the left, the paint/glue mixture is in the middle and the basic ground cover consisting of natural rock followed by ground foam is on the right. After everything is in place I mist a water/alcohol mix over it the basic scenery and then apply diluted matte medium (3/1) to hold everything in place.
A old rotating floor fan is used to speed up drying.
A Few More Details
A lamp post, figures, a stack of ties and ballast. The ballast here is a blend of Arizona Rock & Mineral Cumbres and Toltec ballast and Scenic Express gray ballast. The figures are from Fun & Games. I like stationary figures. While "action" figures frozen in photos look OK, I don't like them when viewing the actual scene. The HO lamp post came from Woodland Scenics. Not sure where the tie stack came from.
The Backdrop
I found this picture of Lizard Head on the internet. I blew it up about 60% with Photoshop and printed it out on 4 sheets of 8.5" x 11" printer paper. I taped the four pieces together, cut out the sky and cut the bottom to match the existing terrain. The original plan was to have Walgreens print at 24" x 60" banner and cut it to fit. Now I'm not so sure. It looks pretty good in it's current form, without any blending to the foreground and attached to the wall with a couple of strips of double sided tape.
Here's an overall picture of the area. About 10-12 hours were spent over 4 days getting the section house/bunk house scene to this point. It still needs more trees and some static grass to represent the meadows typical of the pass.
As always, your comments, suggestions and questions are welcome
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