I want to keep my other thread, DM&IR Hill City Sub: Johnson's Produce, dedicated to the construction and detailing of my produce warehouse, so I'm starting this new thread to document my scenery and landscaping progress. Thanks for reading!
Real Men Don't Wear Pink Since my detail parts haven't arrived yet (somebody's not getting good feedback!), my choices today were to work outside cleaning up the yard, or tackle something else on the layout. One step into the squishy back yard made the decision easy. To the layout I went, and while standing there staring at it, trying to decide what to work on, I realized how sick I was of looking at "pink stuff". Out came the gallon of brown paint, and the pink is no more. Try not to notice the mess on the backdrop, I'll come back and clean that up later.
Dirt After painting the "ground" brown, I realized that I was sort of in the mood to do some landscaping. One of my goals for the layout is to use real dirt as a ground cover. I took an old cookie sheet out to the garden, filled it with dirt, then popped it into the oven. After baking for about an hour at 425 degrees, the dirt was nice and dry, easily crumbled. Using a large strainer, I sifted out the larger bits, leaving me with a fine, dry mix of real dirt. The next step was to cover my first hill with spray adhesive (ordinary 3M spray glue), over which I sprinkled a thin layer of my sifted dirt mixture. On all of my previous layouts, I've used Woodland Scenics ground foams for virtually everything - trees, ground cover, you name it. I'm not sure I want to do that on this layout. To help me decide, I'm going to do one half of this hill with ground foam, with a couple of my twisted-wire & ground foam trees. The other half I'll cover with "real" materials - ground up leaves, twigs, and other "stuff" collected from outside, and upside-down plant roots for trees (following a technique described here: Some ideas for ground cover - TrainBoard.com). Here's the half done with ground foam: Tomorrow I'll do the other half with materials from outside, and decide from there which method I'll use for the rest of the layout.
Turn That Weed Upside-Down Let me start by warning you that this post may seem downright "giddy" - I am SO pleased with the results of my "natural materials" experiment that I can hardly contain myself. My wife is sick of hearing "hey, come look at this!". What do you see here? If you answered "roots", you would be correct. This is the root system of some woody plant that I yanked out of our garden today, washed to remove all of the dirt. I see something more, however. I see a tree. I'm betting that if I turn this upside-down, place it just right, and maybe stick a moldy green rock in front of it, you too will see a tree. Am I right? Looks like a gnarled old tree in late fall/early winter, after all of its leaves have dropped off, doesn't it? Let's pull a few more weeds and see what turns up... Now we have the beginnings of a complete early-winter forest, made completely from stuff collected, literally, in the back yard. All of the trees are roots, the rocks came from a landscaping stone smashed with a hammer, and the leafy covering on the forest floor is exactly that - crushed leaves left over from last fall. In my last post, I said that I wanted to compare this method to the "green foam" method. Seeing the two side-by-side, there's no comparison in my mind. What do you think? I'll be stripping off the green foam side and tossing it in the garbage - no more green foam for me. Time to finish painting the backdrop, and then I have lots of weeds to pull.
Touch Of Gray An important part of the cold late fall/early winter look that I want is the sky. I really want to portray the steely gray color of a cold overcast fall day. I have to repaint parts of the backdrop anyway to clean up the brown paint that I slopped on it, so I decided to experiment with some different colors. The real sky outside today is exactly the color that I want, and since the trees are still bare, I was able to take a couple of photos capturing the entire look. The real sky: I very carefully and precisely slopped together some random blues, whites, and grays, and came up with a sky color that I believe "nailed it":
"Study nature, love nature, stay close to nature. It will never fail you." - Frank Lloyd Wright Seriously, Tracy, your skills continue to amaze us. That all-natural ground cover and root-tree are mind-blowingly awesome, to the nth degree. Gives us a taste of what the rest of the layout will look like. And I (and the rest of the trainboard group) look forward with "baited breath" to see what your final product looks like. KEEP UP THE GOOD WORK!!!
Thanks. I take zero credit for the technique, as I am, without shame, fully attempting to mimic the look and feel of the incredible winter scenes produced by our own mikelhh. I've read every word and studied every photo that he's posted here, and now I'm simply trying to imitate the master...
I've seen his work as well, and mikelhh should be proud of his young padawan, too! It is said that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Also, to the Japanese, to have a student surpass the skills of his or her sensei is also a great honor, not only for the student, but the teacher as well. It gives credit not only to the tallent of the student, but the ability of the instructor to pass along the skills and passion of the trade as well. So, to that extent, you both should be commended on your skills. I can only hope to match you guys when I build my traction layout (and, to some extent, when I landscape the RF&L).
Tracy, Your scenery looks great! When the yard thaws and I start working in the garden I will be looking for those trees hidden in the dirt.
Great start, Tracy. Natural material is a good idea to use. Not so expensive. :angel: You have two ways to make trees, wire and roots, I think. Wolfgang
I Am Not An Artist Multiple failed attempts to paint a forest full of trees has convinced that I am not an artist. If you read my last post, you know what I'm trying to create. All of my best efforts this week have ended up looking like vague multi-colored blobs, not like trees at all. Yesterday, while taking a long lunchtime walk, I studied the wooded hillsides around me. I realized that, in spite of the thousands of trees covering those hillsides, you couldn't see them. Only the first couple of foreground rows were visible, the rest just disappeared. You literally can't see the trees for the forest. With that realization, an idea hit me. A few weeks ago, I bought something called a "grapevine broom" at Michael's. This is a wooden craft item, truly a broom made out of several pieces of grapevine bound together. My intent was to cut it apart and use some of the thicker pieces for making pine trees. Turns out there is another use for it - flat, nearly two-dimensional background trees. I've discovered that if I layer these three or four rows deep against the backdrop, with my "root" trees in front, I can make a convincing forest: This means that my backdrop painting simply needs to be a vague brownish-tannish-grayish hill-shaped blob. The layered trees will prevent a clear view of the backdrop, while allowing the overall shape and color to show through. Armed with this new revelation, I went to work. After a couple of hours of work, I now have the gloomy gray winter sky that I wanted, along with the brownish-tannish-grayish hill-shaped blob: The paints that I used cost me $7, all from the "oops" paint section at Home Depot. The sky is a very light pinkish-orange, almost white flat paint, with a flat gray brushed over it while still wet. Before the paint dried, I went over the entire thing with a wet paintbrush dipped in water, to help blend the colors together. The hills are a chocolate brown, yellow, and gray, each applied while the underlying coat was still wet.
If A Tree Falls In The Forest... ...and there's nobody around to hear it except one little HO scale guy, does it make a sound? Probably, but with this steam locomotive roaring past, who would hear it? As you can see, I've finished "planting" the forest on my first hill. There are hundreds of individual "trees" here, cut from a craft broom (photos below) purchased at Michael's, a handful painted white to represent birch trees, and a few covered in dark green turf to represent pine trees. Very labor intensive, but I have created the stark winter look that I wanted. A wide-angle shot: The broom from which the trees were cut:
Over Yonder Hill The forest has begun taking on a third dimension, in the sense that I now have a hill in front of a hill: I'm not really in a railroad mood tonight, but I wanted to accomplish something, so I spent an hour or so applying the dirt & leaf ground cover to two more hills. This is the furthest, hardest-to-reach corner on the layout, and my plan is to completely finish this section first, then work outwards from there. I'm beginning to regret building this thing three feet deep, but I think it will pay off in the end. A couple of staged shots to show off tonight's work: In this one, I purposely focused on the hill, not the car. That bright yellow really messed with the auto-color on the camera:
Not Out Of The Woods Yet #506 exits the forest as it enters Hill City, but I'm not out of the woods yet. Another afternoon spent "planting" trees, and I barely managed to get a second hill covered. Same shot with a reefer car: Same car, different angle. I think this is my favorite photo: Wrapping up with a wider long-range view:
I like the effect you have achieved using the pine broom to simulate winter foliage. I bought 3 of these brooms several years ago and glued ground foam to them to create some nice trees. I used a few to simulate dead trees, upright and fallen. You created a very realistic forest with your dense planting of the broom bristles. I will add that technique, along with your tree root tree to my proto-arborists bag of tricks. I don't mind that this technique takes a lot of effort. Once the hill is done, it is done. The tree density and random variation fills the scene nicely.
My one concern using the pine tree broom is the color. Trees are not usually that brown. I wonder if the trees could be soaked in a gray or black wash to tone down the brown. I haven't tried this yet.
I am glad to see this thread posted here. I am planning on doing a winter/early spring theme with the scenery on my layout set along the banks of the Little Kanawha River in WV. The gray skies, leafless trees, muddy roads, swelling streams, fresh yellow blossoms of forsythias and other naive early spring flowers. I like how the broom material adds depth to the layout, also.
