I don’t know how I talked myself into this. Barely a year and a half after I started into this hobby and my scenic king techniques are juvenile at best (you might have noticed I have been working on electronics mostly). Now I have decided to focus- one 2.5 by 8’ module will be completed entirely before I do anything else on the railroad. My method is cork roadbed on pink foam (1") on plywood (1/2"), code 100 flex track.
This module has a 2-track passenger station, a freight siding (A/D track really) and two tracks for a dock. Scenery wise, most of the area is taken up by a small dock/container terminal. There is a small downtown area and there is a beach/ocean-front as well. The harbor was easy to do- I cut the 1" pink foam down and painted it blue/green, mixing lighter and greener as I got closer to the wall. The wall was a store brought sheet with adhesive backing. I think Chooch industries.
Now here’s the question: how do I do the beach? There are very few how to videos. I have come up with a method but don’t know if it will work. Does anyone have experience with this? I took a bunch of sand and sifted it thru a tea strainer. But it still looks pretty bug to me in HO.
So far my technique is to put down tan latex paint and while it is wet, pour VERY VERY fine sand on it. Then as I get below the water line and deeper, mix in green and blue with no sand there. Then pour the WS water.
Will this work? What can I use for very very fine sand?
Sounds like you have the technique down pretty well. Before using the sand take a look at some tan ballast in N scale or Z scale, it might be finer than your sand.
Some of the best sand I have seen was made from tile grout. IIRC I think the guy just sprinkled it on and then sprayed it with a fine mist. Doing that rather than mixing it first gives a better sand look. A light touch with weathering powder finishes it off nicely.
I haven’t done it yet BUT I plan to use sand-colored dry powder tempera paint for my beach. Foam base, enough latex paint to fill in the holes in the foam, spray “wetted water” and sprinkle on the powdered tempera. Much like Linn Westcott’s zip texturing with tempera instead of plaster. Have not done it yet so experiment before you take my word for it.
A beach is important to my scene- the Texas seacoast. Originally I planned to have a seawall and beach scene only 14 inches deep, with much of that taken up by a stone arch rail causeway, a concrete auto causeway (would be to the left of stone causeway but not there yet) and a pleasure pier nightclub.
But that just wasn’t enough beach to suit me, so I widened the scene at the seawall to 20 inches.
That gave me room to model an abandoned WWII “Guns of Navarone” style bunker (still there on the prototype)
and provide space for a bunch of beachgoers.
As well as more space for touristy stuff like shell shops
I would also recommend experimenting w/ tile grout. There are quite a few “sandy” beige/ tans that should provide the color of you sand. The trickiest part is the wetting down process, misting on alcohol/ water should provide a decent bond. The other alternative is to use silica sand, it has much finer grit, but it will need to be colored w/ washes to your beach sand, usually is only in white.
You can take a look at swimming pool filter sand,it’s a lot finer than a lot of ballast,the only draw-back is it’s very light colored,almost white and then there is children’s play sand,you don’t have to sift either,of what I mentioned…
I’d probably use water putty for the job but I also like the tile grout idea. I don’t think any grains should be visible because they’d be way out of scale. I reckon something smooth and pastey is the way to go.
In the shallows you could paint a greenish yellow base to give the idea of a sandy bottom, gradually getting greener as it gets deeper.
My son and I used fine buff ballast for sand on his HO layout. It looks nice, bit the grains are way out of scale. Look at overhead imagery if a beach – you can’t see any granularity, but there is a unique, well, chunkiness, I guess, where the sand has been disturbed. I would imagine that something like baking flour or unmixed hydrocal would actually give you the right effect.
Leighant, your bunker looks a lot like the old 16" gun emplacements at Camp Hero at the tip of Long Island. These were originally disguised by painting them to look like a sea-side villsge.
Thanks team for all the ideas. Tile grout will be tried. I also put some sand down just to see how it looks, I don’t know how to be honest. The seabed itself seems OK, the color gradient came out right.
Well, for my money, you’ve got the right approach: get some ideas and experiment. If it doesn’t work for you, try something else. Too many newcomers to the hobby seem to want ti perfect the first time, and are unwilling to try anything unless assured of success! Good luck, and let us have some more photos.
I got them - an even HUNDRED of them- from Asia,either China or Japan as I remember, probably China, for under $10 shipping included, from “that” online auction site. I think they were described as 1/150 scale, slightly larger than N scale’s 1/160, but I figured that Asian bodies are often a little smaller than American ones and the slightly larger scale would yield body sizes that would work out about right. I am satisfied with my scale guesstimate.
I think the 100 figures include maybe 10 different molds, with lots of repeats of the same figure in different color paint. Generally acceptable for a mass scene. But there was one figure type that was just too obviously the same one over and over-- a smallish female figure in a slightly awkward pose, her hands folded in front of her. I just could not imagine so many of the same girl type in a random crowd. She made me think of an anorexic middle-school girl. But where would you find a whole slew of the same figure? Outside a ballet class, waiting for moms to pick them up.
I found a few higher quality bathing suit figures from a set of 100 or so unpainted figures from a European manufacturer. There is an interesting structure six blocks from my home, now a day school, formerly a music school. I have shot pictures to model it “someday” as a dance academy.
And I have painted most of the smallish-girl figures with black leotards and set them aside for that project.
Back to the bathers… Some 90 percent of the bather figures came painted with black hair- appropriate for Asian types. And oddly to me, the other 10 percent had bright red-orange hair.
you’d be AMAZED at the different peoples they have {even painted} in all scales!
But to often find what you want, you need to be creative in your descriptions as they may have 134 packages of people wearing swimsuits, and each has its own named description!!!
they have peoples for about every purpose you can think of, often with many eras represented!
Once you have found the proper descriptions, then you can go to the favorite online retailer and buy them.
