Clermont - Blending Together The Scenery

I'll be short this week because almost everything was said about techniques I use. Photos better render the sense of progress in Clermont.

 

A good coat of brown latex paint and mud were used to blend together scenic elements.While mud is used to smooth landforms, it is also used to create more realistic embankment, including details of collapsing banks.

The culvert is also in place, completing the peninsula scene nicely. Next step consist in ballasting Wieland and starting to add ground cover and modelling the small creek. It isn't far fetched to imagine this will take all summer.

Powdered Glue: Assessment

I'd like to give a significant advice when using powdered resin glue to set ballast in place. First, while it works, you must ensure the glue is perfectly mixed within your ballast. To be honest, this is very hard to achieve due to difference in granulometry. My ballast grains are about 1mm which means the glue has a tendency to gather in some part of the mix, mainly the bottom of the crate. Even if I constantly stirred my container, it seems I couldn't succeed as best as I wished. It means some areas dried darker as if the ballast was still wet. Overall, I also think the ballast is darker than if I used straight white glue.

I've yet to find a solution to make my ballast a lighter shade. My guess is simply to use the powdered stone residue left from sifting the ballast and brush some over the roadbed. A similar experiment coudl be done using chalk powder or other fine material.

However, even if the result isn't yet what I hoped for, I noticed the powdered glue gives a wet look to ballast. It means that someone wishing to model a wetter scene would get a very nice effect using this technique.

This brings back to my mind an advice from Lance Mindheim who experimented with this type of glue a few years ago. The finer the ballast, the better the mix will work. Meaning that it would work better with very fine ballast and dust for roads and parking lots.