Im in quite a situation at the moment. Its 1:01 am, and here i am, on the forums
Im currently doing scenery work on my 5x6 HO layout. The layout is based in new england, around the time Maine Central And Boston and Maine became Guilford Rail System. Im basing the scenery on a Fall Season picture i have of 2 maine centrals and 3 guilford units with a mixed freight.
I need ingredients for a fall ground cover. Im looking for the colored fallen leaves on the ground kind of ground cover.
I’d suggest dried tea leaves. Just glue 'em down with PVA and they take a dab of paint quite well too, if it’s all a bit too uniform in colour for you. Crumble them for various sizes.
Noch have in their product range Red (maple) and Yellow (aspen) leaf flake flock that may be of use. Also Scenic express and Woodland scenics have fall tones in their range of fine ground foam.
There are oodles of commercial products available. If you want to go with Ma Nature just gather up some fallen leaves, dry them out, crumble them up and sprinkle to taste. Mix in some commercial products for those leaves which haven’t lost their color yet when they fall and you have my backyard!
Keith - Much depends on exactly when during the autumn you are modeling. If it’s early to mid autumn, then you are probably not going to see all that many dried leaves on the ground (except deep in the woods). Most leaves come off the New England trees still with at least a modest degree of coloration to them. On the other hand, if you are modeling late fall, then the trees would range from partially to fully bare of leaves and, indeed, much of what you would see would be brown leaves, both on the trees and on the ground.
For the latter situation, one can use tea leaves but in general they are a bit too uniform in color. A better choice is to gather up some actual dried leaves, crumble them, put them through a old electric blender for a few seconds with a little water added, spread them out in a pan and bake them in the oven (when the wife is out!) at the lowest heat setting. When once again dried out and cooled, put the material through a rather fine kitchen strainer and use the fine particles that fall through for your ground cover leaves. The leftover, coarser, leaf material is good for deep woods groundcover.
Personally, I like modeling in the height of autumn’s colors in the Northeast, using a combination of Scenic Express and Woodland Scenics autumn hued ground foams, the former being the better choice in my opinion, mounted on Scenic Express’ Super Tree armatures. Heki also offers their 1630 series of ready-made trees and bushes, one of which is yellowish and in small bits, excellent for autumn brushes and groundcover. Such mid autumn scenes have much greater viewer impact than the drab, dead look, of late autumn.
I do the same thing with fallen leaves and a blender. I never run out of material since it takes me 120 hours every year just to pick up the fallen leaves on my property(3 acres).
I use mostly Oak leaves and mix in some other colors such as Maple and Gum. After grinding in the blender I have a series of different screens to sort out the right size. I use a tea strainer, window screen and a flour sifter as screens. In the Northeast most ground cover under trees unless it is in a park is thick with fallen leaves.
I also use the same technique of using real materials with ballast and rock. I went to the local rock quarry yard and got a big bucket of Blue Stone dust. It did not cost me anything. After sifting with the screens I had an assortment of different size rocks to use in a train yard, along a shore-line, and as road ballast.
