Ground Work in Full Swing
Continuing on with the base work, I began with a basic acrylic earth tone painted over the entire base. Next, I added Heki Grass, #1576 Wild Grass, sheets placed in the desired areas. I found pulling and stretching the sheets gave a decent appearance for my purposes. After the Heki grass was set I scattered crushed cat litter over a wash of water thinned Elmer’s glue onto the open areas, but leaving the outhouse area clear. Before going any further with any more grass effects, I gave the cat litter a thinned oil wash of Burnt Umber for depth, then finishing off by highlighting all the gravel with an acrylic light earth tone. Placing sand and small stones in the small wash area was the last step until minor water effect is added. Time to work the brush.
As mentioned before, tomato and even rosemary, roots seem to work really well when making these bushes and shrubs. Pretty much any dried roots will work, but I preferred the tighter clusters for making the shrubs. Mini-Natur has a full line of useful vegetation for what I’m attempting here, even for the larger scale of this diorama. If it looks natural it will work. The root clusters were placed on scrap foam board for easier manipulation. Now it’s just a matter of making the bushes and shrubs look as realistic as possible.
I also tried out Super Leaf from Scenic Express. These tiny leaves are more in the 1/35th scale but I wanted to see how they would work for shrubs which would have a tighter foliage than the other bushes. I still need a bit more experience with this material, but I think these two shrubs will work well with my planned placement.
Next on the list in the sequence was the ivy crawling up the sides of the outhouse. Using some of the more open pattern dried roots I placed the skeletal frame work in the desired locations and then went back and filled in some areas with tighter root clusters. There is no easy way to make a realistic ivy vine without printing up leaves and cutting each and every one out with an Xacto knife. This is very time-consuming and tedious.
After I cut and pasted the desired leaf photos to a Word doc and printed them onto heavy paper, I painted the back sides of each sheet a dark green tone. Save a step and do it now, right? Once all the leaves are glued to the vines you still need to go back with a light green acrylic tone and touch up each exposed edge. If not, you’ll have quite a few white lines showing all throughout the structure. This too was time consuming and required a steady hand. The ivy work was close to two weeks in the making, but I just had to have that old over growth appearance.
There is still quite a bit more veggie work to do, but the major heavy lifting is done. Once all the bushes and shrubs are in place I will go through and add plant debris and more grass clusters as well as alter grass tones where needed.
More to follow and thanks for watchin. Cheers, Ski.
