I ran a test on some ridgid pink foam before commiting to the layout. Good thing I did as it wasn’t a good method.
I reasoned that earth is brown and grass is green so I painted the test area brown. While the paint was still wet, I sprinked on some green ground foam and let it dry.
The brown paint seeped into the green and made an awful color nowhere near what I expected.
Now, I have two choices. Let the paint dry and glue the ground foam down with a white glue mix or change the base color to green.
I typically sprinkle real sifted dirt and ground leaves onto wet brown paint, especially when building hills where the ground cover won’t stay long enough to glue it. Once the paint is dry, I apply any ground foam and then glue the whole mixture with white glue.
I let the paint dry. It’s not much fun to watch, but it gives you more control of the finished product. I brush on dilute white glue (1:3) before adding scenic materials.
That worked for me. My foam was blue. I painted it earth brown with latex paint off the reject shelf at Home Despot. Thinnd the paint about 50 50 with water. Sprinkled the wet paint with sawdust, which I had dyed green with RIT dye. Looked good. It shows a little earth color where the grass missed, or wears off, but it looks convincing.
It sound like you had too much paint down, and I wicked into the ground cover. Success depends to an extemt on what products you’re using. For myself, I use decent quality interior latex paint from a home center (Glidden Nutmeg Brown) and let it dry before applying ground cover. I use two coats, so if I were going to apply ground cover to the wet paint, I would do so after the second coat. Personally, though, I let the undercoat dry completely, then brush on full strength matte medium, followed by ground cover. When this is dry, I apply more ground cover to get the density right, followed by chuncks of coarse turf to represent bushes and small plants. I mist it lightly w/35% rubbing alcohol, then dribble on dilute matte medium to lock it all down.
[Edit to correct typos, including an unfortunate one that could have been misinterpreted as a racial slur. I apologize if anyone saw it and was offended. While my tablet is great, it does increase ine incidence of typos by about 250%).
Ground foam will act just like a thousand tiny sponges sucking up whatever wet they touch. They suck up your white glue mix as well, but since it dries clear, you don’t see it.
Well, even though your initial application of foam isn’t to your satisfaction, there’s no need to also glue it down - if the paint was drawn into it sufficiently to discolour it, you can be sure that it’s also held firmly in place. [swg]
Why not just paint the foam first and let it dry, then go back and apply the scenic foam in the usual manner? The area already done can simply be covered over in the same manner. The idea of using paint to hold foam in place always seemed impractical to me except for very small areas, as most latex paints dry very rapidly - too rapidly in many cases and especially for that technique. In your case, it seems the paint didn’t dry fast enough (or there was too heavy an application of it), but in either case, there’s very little savings over using the usual dilute white glue method of adding ground cover.
Don’t paint your dirt green [+o(] - you’ll get a much more realistic appearance applying various shades of green (and sometimes other colours, too) over something which looks somewhat like dirt, and that goes for areas which are meant to represent well-manicured lawns, too.
I like to layer the foam using various colours and textures - do it in a single operation - and it will likely obliterate almost all of your initial painting of the layou
The area I must cover is quite large. Layout is a 22 feet X 2 feet shelf. I can “mist” the wet water (or alcohol) to begin but how would I “mist” a watered down glue mix? Eye dropper works for ballast but, for example, how about a 2’ X 2’ field?
I apply ground foam to wet paint but it is spread so thin there is little chance of it saturating the foam. The first layer is just a base layer any way and gives the subsequent layers something to grip. Some of it will show through but not much. Typical I’ll spread an area with earth colored paint and use fine WS ground cover such as earth or soil as my base layer. After it dries I add one or more layers of fine or course material depending on what I am trying to depict (grass, weeds, undergrowth, etc). I’ll then saturate those layers with diluted white glue. The secret to good scenery is layering. Rarely is anything in nature one solid color and texture. The more layers you add, usually the better.
I’ve used the above technique on plaster, plywood, and foam and it works equally well on all.
Thanks for your kind words, Bruce, but anyone is free to dispute my methods. They do work for me, though. There are probably almost as many workable methods as there are modellers. [swg]
For applying dilute white glue, spraying is a good way to apply it to everything within range (including track, fascia, backdrop, etc.) and to render the sprayer useless. I prefer a plastic dropper-type bottle which holds more that an eyedropper or pipette. Those plastic squeeze-type dispensers for mustard and ketchup work well if the opening isn’t too large, or even an empty dispenser for white glue or matte medium.
While I have several different ones, the one shown below is the only one of which I could find a photo:
Bruce, I have to agree with Doctor Wayne about the efficacy of spraying adhesive. I tried that method a couple of times, and gave it up as both messy and ineffective. In order to atomize the adhesive sufficiently, you have to squeeze the trigger hard, so if your sprayer is pointed anywhere near your scenery, you will end up blasting your scenic materials all over the place. I do use a spray bottle to apply the wetting agent (in my case, 35% rubbing alcohol), but for the adhesive itself, I use an old Aleene’s Tacky Glue bottle and dribble the glue on from a very low level so as not to create holes in the ground cover.
I did my layout by painting the foam with a slightly diluted tan latex paint. Sprinkled on several different colors and textures of WS ground foam onto the wet paint. In many places I have added more layers of color and texture, but even where I didn’t, I do not see that much paint was absorbed.
If you used WS products, I wonder if they have changed the type of dye used to be more environmentally friendly, as mine could have been a number of years old before I used it. If you used another brand, I wonder if that is the difference. I have some other brands, but did not at the time I painted the original surface.
I will definitely keep an eye on things if I ever get to doing the next portion of my layout.
