I’m not super crazy about the texture of the plaster cloth, but I resisted the urge to do anything else to it. That was the point of going with the Woodland Scenics kit, to test drive an established standard before I started the inevitable tweaking.
Round 2 was earth and water undercoats. I gave them a day to set and today starts the first layer of ground cover – talus is stained for the cliff face and I have a couple of light layers of grass down. I’ll have to see how the grass builds. While it’s wet the glue disperses the grass from too close and saturates everything in an 18″ radius from too far. Fortunately it’s the beach, so patchy grass makes for a nice transition. Hopefully the rest will fill in once the first layer has some grip.
OK, that builds pretty fucking great, especially once I layered in the accent colors. I also found an old sheet of tufts to use along the cliff edge. I’m going to have to order a bag of talus. Being able to stain it with acrylics is way too convenient. The included stuff worked as advertised, but I have some acrylic inks that would really pop. The rock wall also covers that water-to-earth line, which I wasn’t crazy about. And I won’t have to match it for the water pour.
I used tweezers to interlace some rocks with the tufts alongs the edge and added some lichen along the tideline. Not sure how the undergrowth is going to turn out, but the first layer is down. At the moment it looks a lot like something I unclogged from the vacuum, but given how well the turf built up, I am reserving judgement. Not bad for stained sawdust.
Pretty sure I still have some shells and starfish left from the underwater scatter. I should drag those out tomorrow. Once I get everything I have assembled, I can finish out the last out the boat and pier scale tests and pour the water. I do prefer the painted earth to actual sand; no matter how many times I vacuum, I always end up finding it a week later.
Title notwithstanding, I don’t think there will be any actual trees. Not really in keeping with the piece. The turf turned out better than I expected, but I still prefer static grass. I can see where plaster cloth would be beneficial on a 4′ rail set piece, but I just don’t work on that scale.The earth undercoat has decent tonal variation, but nothing I couldn’t have done in paint with more panache. I will probably order more turf for ground cover and foliage, but I’m not seeing any reason to give up my sculptamold texture. I do kind of want to give it a light glaze of dusty yellow with my airbrush though.
