I am completely new to scenery. I have 1 inch foam board down, my track is laid with roadbed. Now I want to work on just a few small rolling hills. What is the best way to form hills? I have a modular layout and I move it every 2 years or so....
Thanks for helping with your knowledge and experience!
-J
Try looking it up on YouTube - Foam for terrain making -rants'd - Steve's Shorts-02
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Stack some more foam. I glue with low temp hot melt glue so I can keep working. Carve the stacked blocks of foam to the shape you like. Don't be too careful. Paint the hills with a combination of acrylic paint, saw dust, premixed lightweight drywall seam cement , water and Lysol. Be sure it is a little runny. Add a variety of colors of ground foam while still wet. It will look great.
These pictures are getting a workout. I started with this flat space between some tracks, and decided to make a swamp, with some hills nearby.
My layout base is 2-inch foam. I used a knife and gouged out the low places, where I'll put some rock castings and pour Envirotex to simulate water. The gouged foam is a mess, and doesn't look like anything from nature.
There are also some hills in the background, Lacking geologic forces like plate tectonics and being too impatient to wait eons, I cut some foam scraps into hill-like shapes and stuck them down with white glue. Then, I added plaster cloth over the whole mess to even out the terrain.
Better, but still too smooth and too white. I added a skim-coat of Gypsolite, a gray, gritty plaster material that dries hard. Before I spread it, I squirted in some cheap brown paint to give it a tan color.
That tree, by the way, gets removed between steps and just replaced for the phots, because it really provides a nice reference point. Once the Gypsolite is hard, I painted on a camouflage pattern with washes of green paint, and added black high-lights (or low-lights) where the water will be deepest.
If you look in the lower right of the picture and off to the left of that tree, you'll see older areas where I've already completed the ground cover. I first "painted" the ground with thinned white glue, and then sprinkled on various colors of fine turf. I added ground foam, secured with more glue.
It takes an iron man to play with a toy iron horse.
If you are going to plant some trees on the hills, definitely go with foam. Cut one piece the size of the area you want your hill, but don't attach it. Attach some more pieces on top of it and shape them as desired. Surform tools work well, a sharp knife, saw, many things work. I use cheap latex caulk to stick foam together. Once your hill is the shape you like, attach it to the layout and put your scenic material on it. To plant trees, just put a pin in the bottom of them (commercial tree armatures) or poke a larger hole for natural armatures. I put a little white glue in the hole to help hold them in place. I've heard that a tree can move around in its hole and come loose, when used on a layut that gets moved around.
Good luck,
Richard.