Scenery
It has been about 15 years since I have done any serious scenic modelling and not only have new techniques been developed in that period, but I have also accumulated a wide range of scenic items. I have tended to buy things that have sparked my interest in preparation for the day when I would actually use them!
I have taken the opportunity with this layout to experiment with the scenery. Yes, I know I shouldn’t have experimented on the actual layout but I didn’t have anything else to practice on.
I was keen to simulate typical forest undergrowth and experimented with re-cycled tea leaves.
We had started drinking a variety of tea in the leaf form and I noticed that many of these were quite large pieces when brewed. A mixture of green and black tea leaves, dried and whizzed briefly in the coffee grinder seemed to work quite well, with the odd stalk representing small dead branches. I started fixing this with ordinary white pva glue but found that it ‘skinned’ over quite quickly and didn’t really hold enough of the scatter down. Then I remembered that I had some Green Scene static grass glue so I tried that, with much better results.
The next stage was the addition of a variety of different lengths of static grass to areas, depending on where the trees were placed and where the open ground was.
I wasn’t happy with my initial attempts with static grass, so I tried sticking down carpet underlay felt and carefully tearing it off once the glue was dry.
A bit of work with a nail brush to lift the underlay fibres and the application of static grass over the top gave me something closer to the look I wanted to achieve.
I remembered that I had some Little Leaf Company packs from Green Scene (I am not sure if they are currently available) which I dug out to see if they would be any good to mix with my tea leaves for the forest undergrowth. These have a nice leaf shape although they are perhaps a bit on the large side for 7mm scale. However, a quick wiz in the coffee grinder gave a good variation of leaf litter which could be carefully brushed into the low points of the grass and fixed with matte medium spray.
I was also trying to use up some scenic bits that I had bought over the years. I had some old brambles and foliage matting which must have been made with hair spray as most of the scatter fell off when I came to tease it out. A quick spray with matte medium fixed the scatter back in place but I was still disappointed with the results. I experimented with the loose horsehair and coir that I bought off the internet (sold as chair stuffing). I tried using some tacky glue but the fibres stuck together when I tried to tease them out. Copydex worked better but I had to be very quick to get the glue in place before it dried and stuck to my fingers. I found that the best result was when it was rubbed with matte Mod Podge, then glued down and tweaked into place before it dried. More glue was brushed over the horsehair or coir followed by a scatter of leaves to simulate brambles. As I wanted to portray the countryside in June when brambles would be in flower, I very lightly brushing the top of the brambles with glue followed by a very fine sprinkling of white ground foam.
While my attempts with static grass were better I was still not happy with the overall effect I had achieved. Looking around at local woodlands and road side verges confirmed that grasses and cow parsley could grow by more than 3 feet – or 21mm in 7mm scale. I had nothing anywhere near that height so I had to think about how to represent small saplings and wild flowers like cow parsley. I experimented with sea foam (e.g. Forest in a Box) and by spraying the sea foam green, breaking off small sections, gently brushing the tips with glue followed by either a dip in green scatter for the saplings or white scatter for the cow parsley gave me the effect I was after. The cow parsley was a bit open but I hoped I could cram the plants together to better simulate the real thing.
I was feeling very pleased with my creativity until I picked up Gordon Gravett’s ‘Modelling Grassland and Landscape Detailing book (Wild Swan ISBN 978 1 908763 06 8). I had initially read it when it was published in 2013 and in re-reading it I found he covered exactly what I had done. I had forgotten all about the book but something must have stuck in my head as I have pretty much followed his technique.
I was still looking for more lineside texture, so I started adding more weeds made from lengths of bristle from an old broom dipped in glue followed by coloured scatter and leaves. These were planted individually which was helped by my building up the grass in layers resulting in a reasonable thickness of undergrowth to push into. Initially these looked a bit stark so I blended them in with a mixture of flowers and tufts from MiniNatur and PECO and I thought they looked even better when the cow parsley was added.
I still wasn’t too happy with the forest undergrowth which looked a bit flat. I had experimented with some laser cut ferns and bracken but I just couldn’t get the look that I wanted. In the end I decided that trying to portray something accurately just wasn’t working for me and that I would be happier with the impression of plant growth. I looked at my cow parsley and thought “that would also look great without the white flowers” so more sea foam was broken up into small ‘plants’ and dipped in a variety of scatter to give some colour/texture variation. It took about 9 hours to produce enough to cover the station board and a similar time to glue them into position. Each ‘plant’ was glued down individually into my deep grass base before being fixed with a spray of matte medium.
I was reminded, when helping Tim Crockford with his ‘End of the Line’ layout, that young children have a tendency to cling to the edge of a layout – right where I have planted some of my most fragile plants. I compromised and added a row of MP Scenery Products (http://mpmodeltrees.com/) cow parsley along the edge. I wasn’t going to use these so close to the front of the layout as they look like flock covered wire with white scatter on the ends – which is exactly what they are. However, I am hoping that the wire will discourage little fingers but more importantly can be bent back to shape if crushed. The wire isn’t sharp but I hope the texture will cause fingers to be withdrawn. I have also added a rope a few inches from the front using dowel on door stop springs – something that I have seen on a number of exhibition layouts that is light and easy to set up.
I must admit to taking a short cut with the trees; the background ones were proprietary with the foreground trees being a bit more detailed.
The background trees were a mixture of proprietary trees from The Model Tree Shop (https://www.themodeltreeshop.co.uk), Bachmann and Woodland Scenics. The Model Tree Shop ones were not too bad and had some nice loose foliage, but I couldn’t leave them alone as I just had to add my own stamp on them. I managed to keep the open feel to them despite adding leaves. I added the glue by brush which took a lot longer than spraying but meant that I could control where the glue went. I used a mixture of Noch and Polák (https://polakscenics.uk/) leaves and the finished trees were sprayed with matte medium to lock everything in place. A spike was added to each tree so they could be ‘planted’ securely.
The Bachmann trees were twisted wire with something similar to Woodland Scenics mat teased over the wires. I didn’t like the rather obvious twisted wire trunks so I covered them with Treemendous bark powder (http://www.treemendus-scenics.co.uk/tree-kit-order/). I also removed the circular plastic base and glued the wire bundle into some brass tube. This gave something to plant into the scenery and also allowed me to extend the bark down to give a variety of heights between the individual trees. Finally the foliage was dabbed with leaf glue and Noch or Polák leaves applied to give some colour variation and additional texture.
The ready-made Woodland Scenics trees looked good initially but had quite heavily applied foliage which I had to thin out by about 50% before applying glue and leaves. Consequently they are not the best trees on the layout but I think I have got away with using them in the background.
I thought a bit more about some of the forest trees that I wanted within the dense canopy and looking in the local woods I saw that many young trees had slender trunks reaching quite high before any branches or foliage. I had some small 4mm scale sized trees that I had hoped to use as young trees but they just didn’t look right (they looked like 4mm scale trees). So I thought I would stick them on a length of plastic tube and extend the bark downwards making the trunks much longer.
I was hoping to carry some of the forest through the backscene to try and disguise the fiddle yard area but space was tight so I had to glue some foliage sheet to the baseboard edge and put in a few small bushes to give the impression that the forest carried on. A steep cutting and some carefully placed trees helps hide where the line going up the valley disappears through the backscene. I knew this was going to be difficult as the track coincides with a gentle curve of the backscene making the hole through it quite wide.
I had been agonizing over how to do the foreground trees for a while and was interested in Roy C Link’s article in the Review Issue 115 where he mentioned The Scenic Factory (http://www.thescenicfactory.com/). They have a number of excellent videos on YouTube, including two on deciduous trees. I used their techniques to produce my foreground trees using Sage Bush armatures and sea foam for the branches.
I was able to buy some sage bush from Scenic Express when the exchange rate was good (that was quite a few years ago now) and the trees matured gently in the attic waiting for the day when I could make a start. To be honest, I was a bit disappointed in what was supplied. The trees armatures had been advertised as suitable for O scale and in excess of 4 inches tall. They were accurate over the height; they were all just over 4 inches tall but, to my mind, not really suitable for O scale. A review of the sage bush armatures suggested that, with a bit of care and judicious cutting, I could build a taller tree by fixing one armature on top of another. The tree sections were joined using a short section of wire inserted into a hole drilled into the end of the trunk sections with everything glued in place. Most joints were pretty invisible and those that weren’t could be covered by ivy, so I had a way forward.
Also I wasn’t sure how to achieve the open look that I wanted with the foliage but the videos showed how effective sea foam could be when used as the branch and leaf structure. This was the sort of open look I was striving to achieve.
More searches on YouTube suggested that sea foam needed some preparation. Each ‘tree’ had a few leaves that needed removing with tweezers before each tree was treated to stop it from degrading by soaking it in diluted matte medium. I used Mod Podge diluted by about 1:5 or 1:6 as it was the most easily available medium at the time. I soaked bits of sea foam in a tin foil tray, turning them part way through the 15 minute soaking time before shaking off the excess and hanging them to dry.
It was quite noticeable how the sea foam changed from a crunchy, brittle texture to a softer more pliant one during the soaking. The process is a bit laborious and I found it was useful to have some disposable gloves, a bucket of water and an old towel handy to periodically rinse my fingers. A calm sunny day is also an advantage unless you are allowed to make a mess inside!
I subsequently found some sea foam off-cuts at Pendukescenics which had been soaked in glycerine to both preserve them and make then more flexible. I haven’t experimented with soaking my sea foam in glycerine but it looks like a good alternative.
The dried sea foam was spray painted using Halford’s car spray. I chose grey undercoat as I couldn’t find anything that matched the bark colour on the sage bush armatures.
The top ends are the best bits of the sea foam and I reserved these for the thicker ends of the tree armature branches. On the first trees they were fixed with a ‘tacky’ type of glue such as ‘3M 77’ which I sprayed onto the relevant areas. Once the basic sea foam sections had been added I filled in with smaller sections to try and disguise where the sea foam sections have been glued on.
A great tip passed on to me by Harry Mantheakis on the Narrow Gauge Railway Modelling Online Forum was to spray these parts with the same diluted matte medium solution to fix them in position. The same spray was initially used to fix the leaf foliage in place but I preferred to ‘paint’ static grass glue onto the tree for fixing the leaves as it gave me much more control over where the leaves went.
Although I used the spray adhesive outside while also wearing a respirator face mask, I found that I was affected by the fumes so on later trees I used super glue with a spray on accelerator. Whilst both methods have been okay I have re-fixed a couple of pieces using the old fashioned hot glue gun which seems to be more secure.
It took me a day to prepare enough sea foam for 3 to 4 trees and each tree took about a day to produce, although I found that I could not concentrate on adding the branches for more than a couple of hours at a time. I got better with each tree and a bit lighter with adding the leaf foliage. It is very easy to overdo the foliage and lose all the openness achieved by using sea foam.
I am hoping that these trees prove to be robust enough for transportation and exhibition use. Time will tell…
I built the trees with particular locations in mind and realised (following discussion on the NGRM Forum) that I needed at least two dead trees in the foreground just so the public could see the trains. I was very wisely advised to make these removable to allow access for track maintenance and stock retrieval (should the need arise). I also decided to place some tree stumps in the area to make it look as if it has been cleared. I added some smaller trees in between to simulate new sapling growth. However I didn’t want to overdo that as I would have blocked the view for those of a shorter stature. One of the felled trees has two Phoenix figures with a saw about to cut another chunk off. The excuse for not pulling it to the railway is that it was diseased so no good for timber but great for the stove. Plus they probably would have damaged the railway in the process which is why they still haven’t done anything with the other tree trunk.
Set as a working railway in a forest, it doesn’t need many figures but I felt that I needed enough to give it some life. As is so often the case with an exhibition layout I have found that there is a fine balance between what people expect to see and going over the top. In reality I think this railway would have had very few people but this didn’t look right so I have added a few more in an attempt to bring the scene alive. Figures are a mixture of Aidan Campbell, Phoenix (from S&D Models) and Prieser. They are generally set in little static cameo scenes as I don’t think ‘frozen action’ figures really work. Even the pair with the saw are just about to start work while being distracted by the chap holding his cup of tea. Some of the figures are painted by my daughter’s partner who is very experienced with Games Workshop painting techniques and has tried to pass on some of his knowledge (sometime in vain).
There are more construction photos on the Scenery Gallery page
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