I am in the progress to expand my layout in a new room and because I will run it in an Appalachian country I need a lot of vertical scenery.
I use from years the old messy paper towels dipped in plaster or plaster clothes but it’s so messy! It could also give some dust in the process in the layout room. Definitively I wanted an another approach.
I just received the book of Mister Howard Zaine about his Piermont Division; he explain how he do it’s hardshell, I was convinced and make a try. ( the book at www.zanestrains.com)
Mister Zane and a friend of mine use this approach. It’s easy, fast and not a mess (best of all) . All the mountains on the Piermont Division and on my friend layout use this approach ( my friend layout at http://users.skynet.be/pro-rail/)
I made a skeleton of lattices of carboard that roughly follow the future shape of the hill, all is glued with hot glue gun.( use a brand of glue which don’t give “wire of glue” you know what I mean…!)
The big shape are cut from blue foam (use a hot wire cutter to avoid the small ball run everywhere)
Than the shape is covered whith an heavy paper (brown paper bag is a good one) and glued on the lattice again whit hot glue. You can cut it in pieces to an easier placement.
When the paper is glued on the lattices, I litteraly heavily paint on it white glue non diluted.
I use a brand of glue which dry fast and its sold in a 5 or 10kg bag for professionnal users. I beleive you can find the same in USA
When dry you have a strong hardshell; it’s strong enough to put on it rock plaster mold.
It could be painted whit any color you like but a good idea is to use latex paint strong from
It’s called Red Rosin paper commonly used as underlayment for hardwood flooring. Once dry you can also re-wet the hard-shell if you wish to put down ground cover or rock castings etc. I simply just brush an other layer of straight white glue down and add ground cover.
The trees are hot glued too on the hardshell, it’s also faster than glued them with white glue.
Second, in my case I will model Appalachian country which is heavily covered by forest.
If You take a look of the two layouts I mentionned in my post, the forest canopy is made from puffballs polyfiber or like Mister Zane layout, whith cluster of foam. They are great in Nscale to make the canopy the scale I use to model.
For big surface covering, Mister Zane use a like carpeting method; he prepare piece of paper of a average 10"by 10". They are covered on the workbench with clusters. When finished he glue them on the hardsell like a carpet. You can cut this carpet in the size you want to adjust them on the hardshell.
The join between "carpets"are hidden with more pieces of foam cluster. He do the same around the rocks molds.
The result is a fast and neat covering of big hills. You can read again this about in Model Planning 2009 where some part of the late VO railroad where covered whit a similar method. The results are convincing.
Bob the stuff you buy in the home centers like Home Depot or Lowes usually works better then the craft store stuff but you can still use it if you have to.