I have been working on my scenery for a couple of weeks now and am to the point where I need to start with painting and groundwork. My layout is mountainous and there are a couple of sections where the scenery is almost 90 degrees straight up. Painting is no problem but what about ground covering and having it hold ? I’ve seen suggestions about sprinkling it right into the paint, as soon as it is applied. I’ve seen suggestions about brushing glue on for the additional holding power and then sprinkling into the glue. Can someone tell me what has worked for them so I don’t end up with a big pile of ground cover at the bottom of the landscaping and nothing on the scenery ?
I’ve done both with good results, thou my slopes were more like 60 degrees. Build a small mock-up seperate from your layout and try it on that. If it works there, it should work on the real thing.Good luck, Mike
May I suggest exposed rock work for the 90 degree sections? You can make some very quickly using crinkled up aluminum foil as a mold, spray with Pam or similar, and filling with plaster of paris or equivilent. I don’t think much foliage will grow on a verticle mountainside except for maybe some scrub brush or small trees you can make from lychen.
Jeff - Quite honestly, there is a little complication in the real world called the angle of repose - an angle or tilt beyond which nothing in the real world will keep a particular material (sand, dirt, rock rubble) from sliding down hill. Only a strong rock face can be vertical and even that sometimes for only so long. I’m afraid too many modelers create vertical walls of trees or greenery that they feel supposedly represents hillsides but which could not possibly occur in nature. Building such makes for a very odd, unnatural appearance to the layout’s scenery. Better to attempt to introduce some angle to the slope…as has been suggested maybe 60-degrees, (which is even beyond real-world possibility, except for rock).
CNJ831
However if you do want some stray greenery on your rockface, one way to accompli***his is to apply glue(or the wet paint) to the rockwork, fold a piece of paper into an ‘L’ shape and put some ‘grass’ in the fold, point the horizontal side to the cliff and gently blow down the paper scattering the ‘grass’ into the wet paint or glue. Have another piece of paper under where you are working to catch the fallout.
I seem to remember the angle where nothing will grow to be 60 degrees, except as previously mentioned, an odd bush in a crevice . This said, its your rockface.
Have fun & be safe,
Karl
Thanks for the suggestions. Yes, I should have mentioned that much of it will be rock face and it isn’t exactly 90 degrees but there will be some ground cover in spots. I’ll post some pictures once I am done (if they are good enough to post).
If your scenery is truly vertical, there are two details you should consider adding to the scene:
-
The litter of talus at the base of the cliff.
-
Slide fences along the adjacent track. These resemble wide-mesh wire fencing, connected to the outspread arms of pole-mounted electrical detector boxes. When the fence is moved by falling rock, it releases the detector box arm, setting the signals protecting that track to absolute stop.
If you simply want to compress your scene, it would be possible to build near-vertical scenery with large trees at the bottom, scaling back in size and adding more blue and grey to the color with each succeeding row, classical forced-perspective tricks. Once past that first row at the bottom, don’t try to model entire trees (except for dead snags,) just the top tufts. Of course, this is a diorama trick. If the scene can be seen end-on, it’s impossible to sustain the illusion.
Chuck
I’ll be having the same scenery challenges on my planned layout. I’m even thinking of having some OVERHANGING (100 degree scenery) rock work at a couple of places. Fun, huh?
I’ve found a similar issue on my hexagon layout.
After applying the rocks from the molds, and adding some finish plaster to eliminate the finger furrows and such, there’s still some weird areas in between rocks and on the sides.
Since I was working over a particular chunk of rock in a bend in a river bank, here’s what I did. (See the picture below for a reference to the area involved.)
First, I placed some big chunks of talus at the bottom. In a freeze-thaw cycle, rock will always break off and pile up. Also, in this case, I have a stream that would be wearing away any underlying layer of rock, so overhangs will eventually crack and fall.
Second, I used progressively smaller pieces of talus, either right below the cliff or rolled down from on high. In fact, most of the rock you see in the middle of the stream bed ended up there from the rolling. A lot also filled in the gaps. (In the photo, the area I’m describing is what you see upstream of the bridge.)
Third, I used some Hob-E-Tac adhesive from Woodland Scenics on the vertical sections that got painted in earth tones, or that were clearly too smooth to qualify as real rock. (One example of this kind of vertical face is seen next to the tracks on the right side of the picture; another is almost directly above the right half of the bridge, there’s a brown-painted section between some rocks.) This adhesive comes with a brush, and it stays put, since it is pretty thick. You have to let it sit for about ten minutes before it is tacky enough to really hold stuff well; the directions indicate that it will start turning clear at that time.
Fourth, I used some of the Foliage from Woodland Scenics. This stuff is like colored hair with bits of ground foam on it, and you pull it out and keep tugging at it until it is as diaphonous as you want. I was generally pulling in only one direction so I could get the long, clinging
While vertical scenery (ground cover and trees) are really not able to happen in real life I have seen many examples of it done on model railroads. Now some of them are not very convincing but others are very well done. Howard Zane’s layout shows this on the Keller video and I have also been there to actually see it. The video does not do it justice only seeing it in person can one really appreciate it.
Now I suppose the average modeler is not supposed to do the vertical scenery but when you make the big time (video) then it may be OK! Two standards I guess!
BOB H – Clarion, PA