The Grass IS Greener!

After I finally got back to the layout, I decided I'd keep the hills for a little while at least, even though I wasn't happy with them.  Every video I saw showed people making nice smooth hills and having no problems getting their Hydrocal-soaked paper towels to lie flat and fairly smooth.  That's not what happened to me.  They looked too craggy and paper folds had created odd shapes, and my attempts to smooth the plaster had only left me with whipped cream-like points that hardened far too quickly.

But instead of tearing them out I made a wash out of Woodland Scenics stone gray coloring and brushed the hills with it.  Immediately, the hills took on a new look and a new life.  They weren't perfect: some areas were lighter than others; some got too dark.  But overall it left me with something to work with.

I started by using earth tone chalks, applying to certain areas that I thought would color nicely. Using a short, stiff brush, I worked in several colors in a number of areas before I realized I could spend a week on just chalking the module, and then when I added ground cover the chalked areas would get covered up..

You may notice something in the photos in this posting.  It being the middle of summer with temperatures in the high 80s, low 90s, I switched out my extremely warm halogen lights with two huge curlicue CFL bulbs.  They throw a yellowish light, but they do have a large 4200 lumens each (when compared to other CFL bulbs).  And they throw off very little heat.  Much easier to work in the garage during the summer with those bulbs.  I'll save the halogen for the winter.

So I switched to ground foam.  I used the standard method of spraying Scenic Cement and sprinkling green ground foam onto the hills.  I used a couple of colors, then added bushes a couple of places.  You can see a fair amount of detail in this shot.

In this image (above) you can see the multiple colors of grass.  One section of the hills (the right side) was too steep to take any grass.  This I colored with a couple of chalks.  You also can see the cardboard cutout of the base of a gravel road I'll be adding a little later.  It is crossed by a track (placed only for visualization) that will hold stock cars.

This next photo shows two tunnels: a two-track concrete and stone and a concrete two-lane automobile tunnel.  I used old concrete acrylic for the top portion of the train tunnel and several layers of various colored chalks for the stone portion.  I used concrete acrylic for the auto tunnel.  You can see some areas that need fixing.  There is also a concrete road along the right edge of the photo that crosses the entire width of the module.

This shot shows the other side of the module.  You can see a lot of detail here: the grass, bushes on top of the portal, chalked portions of the hill.  Much more to do, but it's a real good start.

But before I can go any further I have to build a stock yard, which will be on the other side of the switch that you see in the foreground.  It's a complex laser-cut kit that I have to kitbash to get it to look like the stock yard I envision.  So it's going to take some time before my next posting.

Tectonic Movement ....

At the core of it, my layout is basically N-Trak.  I've modified the N-Trak ideals to fit my needs, of course, and I'm sure N-Trak.org would be appalled with what I've done.  But it fits my situation.  With N-Trak, although you are creating separate dioramas that are put together to build a complete layout, you really have often wildly disconnected scenes.  You can have a mountain in one module right next to another module that has an oceanside pier.  Or a city that ends abruptly next to a farm.  All of it is at the whim of the club members who choose their own module designs, and then the uncertainty of who will decide to attend which show.

I wasn't making all of this as part of a club; it's just for me.  So I wanted to do something different with the transitions.  Usually, N-Trak units have fiber board or hard board walls on the sides of their modules.  These are painted with images that mesh with the module's design:  low hills and blue skies for a farm module; a city-scape for a downtown layout.  While this works, I don't really like it for my design.  First, I'm no painter.  I used an airbrush fairly well recently, but my artwork would be fit quite nicely in a second grade classroom.  Second, I wanted to integrate the transitions into the scene a little more than N-Trak usually does.

My solution is to create low hills between the scenes.  Each of these will reflect the geographic structure of the area I'm trying to depict, and will have unique features: water falls, rock formations, timbered hills, and the like.  This might require a bit more work (especially with Hydrocal!), but I believe that visually it will be more pleasing.

In the picture above you see the cardboard webbing that will support the Hydrocal-soaked paper towels to form the hill.  This is the left side of Module 2.  It's a ranching scene with cattle pens.  There is also a highway (or what used to be called a highway before Eisenhower started up the super highway program in the '50s), a feed mill, and a mainline that breaks off into two tracks, along with two separate turnouts; one for the cattle pens and one for the feed mill.  I'm going to have a farm road, too, that will cross the tracks to reach the highway.

The webbing is connected to a cardboard wall at the very left edge of the module that will be removed once the Hydrocal is dry and hard.  Adding some degree of difficulty is the railroad tunnel that will provide access from this module to the next.  This is a major point in the building of this layout.  I've been thinking about creating this large layout in my garage for years.  I've planned out most of it, right down to some of the smallest details.  For many reasons I haven't been able to work on it very much, and when I could it took a lot of time to work out a number of problems and build the base.  Gluing some cork or building and painting a model is one thing.  This geographic structure -- to me, at least -- is something much bigger.  It's a signal that I'm really going forward with the project.  And that's a little scary.

You probably can see that I glued the cork roadbed.  I did some sanding of the roadbed as it meets up with the Mold-a-Scene patch underneath the feed mill.  I had to use a plastic shim (slightly sanded) to bridge the gap between the end of the sanded cork and the beginning of the trough (which is covered by the wide piece of masking tape.

Another bit of detailing I did was with the tunnel entrance.  I wanted it to retain it's stone look and texture while giving it an old, dirty look.  This is a portal I've had for a while, and over the years it accumulated a lot of dust and dirt.  That was good.  But I needed to give it a light stoney gray color.  After some fits and starts, I decided to color some water with about half a teaspoon of stone coloring from Woodland Scenics and then soak the portal for a few minutes.  The end result wasn't bad, maybe not as dark as I would have liked.  Guess I needed some more of the stone coloring.  To fix this I used some chalks to color parts of the portal to give it a sooty look, as if years of steam engine passage had darkened portions of the arch.  This picture may not be the best representation of it.  I haven't figured out how to manage the macro setting with aperture control.

Next, I raise mountains ....