I’ve been experimenting with Pot Topper for tall grass and like the outcome. First randomly dry brush the topper with various green acrylics left over from painting the backdrop. Then highlight with straw and off white dry brush. Remove the backing, cut and tear to rough shape and glue down. Hot glue works, but leave those long filaments that I can just feel getting into gears, etc., so I switched to white and yellow glue and hold them in place with push pins until dry. I work ground foam into and around the bare spots, crevices and, especially, at the transitions to roads and ballast. Spraying with Dullcote takes away any sheen. This system covers a lot of territory fast. I hope Michael’s keeps stocking these!
That looks AWESOME Mike, very well done. I need to go pick up some Pot Toppers as well. But I need more of a dry wheat grass. Can you paint those with an airbrush?
Looks good. I tried a small chunk of one, like it. Mine is in a swampy area, so the shiney grass is OK. Like your ideas of coloring and toning them down a bit.
You could use an airbrush. I think that a spray can will work just as well if you can find the right color. The dry brushing takes almost no time and I think it really adds to the effect. George Selios did the same thing with fake fur.
Mike, if I might, let me offer a few bits of constructive criticism regarding your use of “pot toppers”.
As you have utilized them in your otherwise very good looking posted layout scenes, if the actual color of the grass is as it appears in your images, then it is far, far too intensely green, as well as being too dense in nature, to believably represent the grass/weeds one might see in the area of a real rail yard, or roundhouse area.
You indicate in your post that you employ ground foam around the edges of the pot toppers to blend them in. However, at the low angle of your shots the edges of the pot topper material still shows way too much. It gives more of an impression that these are huge masses of rolled sod that have simply been laid out on top of the ground, not masses of grass growing out of it. You need to find a way to blend in the edges in a much better manner, perhaps by thinning the edges of the pot toppers themselves, or building up a tapered ridge of foam/dirt around their edges.
I agree, thout it might also help if the track were laid on the grass instead of vice-versa. I could see this making a nice overgrown railroad though, letting it poke throuh ballast and all.
Thanks for the advice. I haven’t got all the edges blended in yet and that shows in some of the shots. One of the down sides of the toppers is the thickness. I discovered they work better in areas where I have not yet brought the ground up to the level of the track and can use the dimension of the toppers to do that. As to color, I guess that is in the eye of the beholder…and I’m blue-green color blind, so I rely on matching to the Woodland Scenics foam as best I can. My plan is to go give the whole area a light spray of grimy black to further dull it down, after I complete the rest of the scene.
Only thing hard about using the toppers is because they are so thick. Next time I use them I going to make a small impression in my foam base so they sit a little lower.
Mike, while I would have to agree your weeds look a little to lush fore the area you modeled, it still looks pretty darn good!
