Starting on a new project. I am attempting to make a diorama to take train pictures. I am starting out with inserts that comes from a ceiling fan box. I covered any depressions with dryer sheet and painted with white glue to make the dryer sheets stiff. Than I used a steel wire brush to ruff up the front side. I will be using homemade flock. I will post more pictures as I progress.
I painted the front wall brown and put a coat of watered down sheetrock mud on top and I am letting that dry.
My used coffee grounds experiment: After collecting the grounds out of the filter, I put it in my "kiln", AKA my toaster oven set at about 200F to dry them out for a couple of hours. It looks pretty good. Nice color. In this photo, they are dry, but tend to clump together. The other source of material, Brita filter contents, don't clump after drying and flow smoothly when poured into a hopper car.
Thinking of making a load out of the pieces that keep moisture out of medicine bottles. Do they look in ok in a gondola or maybe a flat car load? I think in HO scale they are 5 feet tall.
That looks pretty good! I'm also a fan of repurposing various expended stuff into loads, scrap and other bric-a-brac. Keeps them out of the landfill!
Started making a hill for the right hand back corner of the new diorama, Using foam board pieces from packing box and leftover from store bought, a dryer sheet and hot glue. Not sure how this will turn out.
Just put the last coat of sheetrock mud on the proposed hill and it is drying in the sun. Will fix the cracks after everything is dry then I will paint the middle and top a earth color and put ground cover and I think, paint the front rocks. Any suggestions?
Leave the cracks alone. Exploit them as scenery. Cracks are inevitable in any kind of rock face or other slope. Make stuff grow out of them. Unless, of course, it's compromising the structure of your hill. Then fix them.
In my opinion various stains or washes made with thinned acrylic paint look better than painting with full strength paint. The colored washes follwed by thinned india ink washes give more color variations and depth to the rocks.
Shot of hill after flock applied. All material is home made. Small bushes are colored sponge and grass is green & brown colored sawdust I used different color washes for the rocks.
I tried using charcoal ash from my grill years ago ,thought it would look great with some weeds to model a poorly maintained branch line , However when the white glue mixture started to dry all the ballast /grass turned milky white. After drying completely add just added ground foam over the top to cover it up and the same thing happened. had to paint over all of it and then ground foam to make weedy branch line. So if you think BBQ ash looks like a good ground cover, maybe try something else.
I hot glued the hill to my new diorama and put green colored sawdust as ground cover to cover up the void. Will add more cover - bushes, etc., as time goes on.
The coffee grounds experiment didn't quite work as expected. It seems that coffee doesn't take to Scenic Cement at all. I poured some grounds into the latest hopper kit I finished and when it came to setting the whole shebang with the glue, the darn glue, instead of flowing down into the grounds like it does with water filter grains, it just made a puddle on top of the coffee grounds! I thought about using some clear matte spray paint, but thought better of it because coffee grounds are light and tend to fly off all over the place with the slightest breeze (spill some of the stuff when you're making coffee and you'll know what I mean - you think you got all of them and later you find a lot of them are back...). I poured the grounds back into the bowl and put the stuff away while my brain goes back to the drawing board. It was very unexpected. Meanwhile, the hopper will get some of what I call "real fake coal", the water filter grains. Stick to what works.
Put a wash and added material to the two new rock formations. Also added some fallen trees that I got from the trees in my yard. I sprayed them with a clear coat than glued them in place.
Gondola load made from the medicine bottle moisture absorbers. Not sure what this load would be called.
