Scenery Details

Added dirt and some vegetation today. The dirt is sand from the Lockwood Valley. If this was a working layout I'd be somewhat hesitant to use sand as ground cover, for fear it might find its way into locomotive mechanisms, but this is a mostly passive diorama, so not much of a concern there. The vegetation is Woodland Scenics and other brands of ground foam. I plan to add other plants, including some fake fur grass tufts and sisal twine reeds at the bottom of the slope.

The background hills are coming out very blue in all my photos. I installed LED tape lights, which are giving everything a bluish cast that I can adjust for in software, but I can't seem to eliminate in the background. I may try swapping the cool white LEDs for warm white.

Update: Now that I look at it, I think the problem is that I got carried away with the black wash on the background hills. They really are more grey than tan. I'm considering whether to repaint with the tan paint, then use a red-brown wash instead of black. Or just leave it. The blue cast does make the hillside seem farther away in photos.

The pines in the background are Woodland Scenics metal-trunk kits from way back. They are closer than anything else I have found to the pinyon pines that are common on the lower slopes around the Lockwood Valley. I have another batch on order. See the picture below for what I am going for.

The foreground plants are dead or dormant sagebrush. I came across an article here http://www.pacificcoastairlinerr.com/brush/ on modelling this kind of brush with fake fur. Early experiments are promising.

Here's a picture of some attempts at fake fur sagebrush:

All of these started with brown fake fur because I have a lot of it on hand -- someone gave it to my wife several years ago and it's been in a box in the garage ever since.

My first effort was to color the brown fake fur with gray paint. I tried a couple of colors -- most are done with Model Master Camouflage Gray -- applied with an airbrush. The line of bushes running diagonally across the right side of the photo represents this group. Weird thing: What looks good outdoors in the sunlight, looks much too blue under the LED lights inside. Doesn't blend at all with the predominantly brown colors of the rest of the scenery. The photo above was taken with the LEDs turned off, using just the flash on my Google Pixel 4a phone, and it looks okay. This has me thinking again that I may need to replace the LED tape lights just above the diorama with warm white tape lights.

The cluster of brown bushes on the left were brush painted with an old bottle of Poly S Earth. These look too brown to me, and anyway, the brush painting messed up the nice, fluffy texture.

Top center is a single bush done with Model Master Sand. This is an enamel and seems to cover better than the acrylics, and the color is good, both in person and in photos. I don't know if I can get the same color in an acrylic. If I have to, I'll work with the enamel. When I have time, I'm going to try making up a batch in this color, with maybe a few drops of green added, then sprinkle on some yellow Woodland Scenics foliage to represent blossoms.

Addendum 4/8/22: Still experimenting with the sagebrush. I picked up some gray craft fur (Joann's sells 9x12 pieces, which will make a lot of sagebrush) and a bottle of Vallejo Light Green Gray, #70971, which looks like a pretty good sage color. I plan to break out the airbrush over the weekend and try applying the Vallejo paint to both brown and gray fur tufts.

I've also pretty well determined that I need to replace the LED tape lights with warm white.

Addendum 4/11/22: I added castings and basic ground cover on the last part of the diorama over the weekend. I also found a bag of AMSI gray ground foam, applied it to a tuft of gray fake fur, added a good sprinkle of Woodland Scenics yellow flowers, and I think I'm finally really close to what I was looking for to represent sagebrush. I'm going to make up few more of these and try spraying them lightly with the Vallejo light green-gray before adding the flowers, but this looks really close. I showed it to my wife, and asked her what it looked like, and she said "sage." I knew there was a reason I love that woman.