Landscaping help!

Herc Driver

Active Member
Guys I need some help, direction, tips...when I first started my first layout I went out and bought way too much lichen and trees and re-created the Black Forest. Over time, I've been removing them feeling that there was too much for the layout and it wasn't anything like the area around my home. Today, I removed all the lichen trees and lichen ground cover. I still have some trees that are like those found locally, but my problem is that with the lichen removed, there's a fair amount of open area on the hills that need something...and I'm a poor landscaper to know what that something is. I've been trying to use many of the ideas I've seen on layouts posted right here, but I fear my layout is stuck on three basic colors and lacks that "real-ness" I'm looking for. I used a latex brown to cover the hills and a green/brown small ground foam mixture to cover all the hills and the area between the green grass (matt paper product by Noch) and the track ballast. I've tried to cut faux fur to Nscale size for large areas of grass - but really didn't get the results I wanted. What I think I need is more brown grasses but how do I accomplish that in Nscale? Everything I've seen in grass is always HO scale and looks great...what about N? All the books I have use only ground foam...and I've been cutting the Woodland Scenics grass and "planting" plugs of it here and there, but it's very time consuming and doesn't convey the wide areas of overgrown grass that I'd like to model. So how do you do create grass in Nscale?
 
Hey buddy,

I love to landscape. HO is my scale, though.... As I read your post the only thing that comes to mind is; Landscaping needs to just happen, I don't think it can be contrived.

As a brief example... when painting the ground do you let one color dry before applying the next? I don't. Let the colors blend and swirl with a lot of wash.

I would think that in N scale, your only choice for grass would be WS ground foam. I would think everything else, in that scale, would be too heavy and/or tall.

Trees are easier made by rolling dryed weeds and flower tops around in WS ground foam after spray painting them. I use lichen sparingly, only for bushes, really.....

You can hang lichen from trees by it takes practice, I have also heard lichen desinegrates over time.

Keep pushing the paint around, let it happen... :thumb:

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Herc Driver

Active Member
Thanks E-Kyle for the ideas...I'm still playing with Joe Fugate's technique of using faux fur for larger areas of grass land...last night I trimmed the fur down to a reasonable Nscale size and instead of spray painting it to a color, I tried chalk dust, brushed in areas to give variation in color. Looked ok until I added some blue by mistake...so today I'm going to fix those areas where the lichen was - probably by re-painting and applying ground foam again, only this time utilizing more diverse shades of green. What's a Saturday without a trip to the LHS?
 
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