Winchester Paston & Portsmouth

Lately I have been working on a big mountain scene with a tall steel trestle, and I had gotten as far as roughing in the mountain shape using expanding foam over a wire mesh. The mountain shape needed some refinement so I have used some additional Great Stuff to build it up in areas, and I’ve used my knife to carve away other areas (mostly removing the crown off of blobs). But the “ground goop” or finished plaster layer will smooth over things and give a final contour to the land. Here is how I go about making my topsoil.

Tags: Layout, scenery

Here are the colors I have selected for painting my backdrop. They are chosen so that they blend well with the Woodland Scenics ground foam and other scenery materials I am using. By choosing some standard colors like this, I know that I can come back much later and paint more backdrop, and it will match what was done previously.

Tags: backdrop, paint, scenery

One recent revelation I had was that there is a use for all those tea bags that I’ve just been throwing away all these years. Not the bags themselves, that is, but the tea leaves inside. It turns out they make a great source of leaf litter, to dress up a forest floor!

Tags: Boyce, scenery, tree

While my N-Trak module depicts Boyce Junction, Virginia, in a fuller way, I wanted to include an abbreviated version of it on the layout. This corner includes tracks which cross at the same 45 degrees, and the same interlocking tower that I use on the module sits here. The tracks, however, are purely scenic and terminate just a few inches after the crossing. My approach to handling this abrupt end is to have the trees crowd in around the track, so that it vanishes into the forest.

Tags: Boyce, scenery, staging

Many model building kits do not come with an adequate foundation, if they come with one at all. Usually they may come with a flat piece on which the building sits, that assumes the structure will be placed on a truly flat and level surface. If you want to place a building into a non-flat landscape, then, you are left to fabricate your own foundation. Here is how I did one of mine.

Tags: building, scenery