What is a good way to portray grass or wheat?
The best way to do grass is to stick medical lint down and colour it up withposter paints and pastels. Some people stick it face down, then rip it up when it's dry, leaving the whiskers behind.
That's a better system when you want a patchy covering. If you tease the hairs up with a brass wired suede brush and spray lightly with hair spray it will stand up and be scattered with fine granules
for crops, wild flowers, etc. If you want a close cut shave it with an old Remington.
Martin
Can you get that carpet underlayer (or whatever it's called), that looks like tall grass, in North America? Everyone in the UK seems to use it and it looks fabulous between rails on a little-used
spur.
The material used on painting pads (if you've ever painted sheetrock with latex, you've probably used one) is a darn good stand-in. It is sort of like very fine carpet strands woven together.
Jim Ogden
I've just inherited an farm module that needs a lot of work. I had an idea for creating a crop of "something".
Any of you have ideas and/or specifics on what materials you've had success with? Preferbly something that won't put me in the poor house?
One of our club members used carpet squares cut into smaller section to represent wheat being harvested. With a G.H.Q. harvester,and farm tractor and trailer alongside it looks great for very little cost. A brown / grey tile grout was applied between the carpet pieces to represent dirt after the crop was harvested. Looks great and get lots of comments from the public on our open days.
David Aitken
A coir mat (or part thereof) can also be used to represent a wheat field.
Khris
Sorry, but what's a "coir" mat?
It's a coconut husk fiber woven door mat. Looks like a good idea to me.
Bob Schwartz
Downunder we call then coir (spelling) They are like a bristle type of mat. quite often available with words on them like Welcome etc. If you imagine coconut fibre but straight, that's what it looks like.
khris
I attended an NMRA meet and one of the clinics was row crops. He used indoor/outdoor carpet. He bent it over a large rod to spread the rows and used a soldering iron to remove every other row. The he took a brown heavy marker and filled in the dirt between the rows then lightly went over it with brown. Then it was sprayed with dullcoat.
He prepared the underlayment by carving styrofoam into a drainage strip and laid the carpeting over it and glueing it down. He mixed some plaster very thin, added paint to simulate dirt and "painted" the edges. this brought the surrounding foam up to crop level. You could hardly tell the edges. After adding fencing, it was very nice.
Barb
Methods: Apple trees are Woodland Scenics (approx 3" with WS clump foliage) that I sprayed with matte medium and then hung them upside down while sprinkling WS apples on them (same method can be used for orange trees)...
The wheat field is Busch Corn Field Mat 7219 (32"x32")...I bought it to use as a cornfield but it turned out to be a straw colored grass mat...doesn't look at all like a cornfield but is a great wheat field...
Strawberry field was done by painting the area with Modge Podge (a very thick matte medium) and covering with dried coffee grounds while area was still wet...then I painted rows with Modge Podge and sprinkled on more coffee grounds for the raised strawberry rows...added small pieces of WS clump foliage on the raised rows for the plants...then sprayed the plants with matte medium and sprinkled WS red flowers on the plants for the strawberries...also added piping with sprinkler heads (Williams Bros pipeline kit 62000) in the strawberry field and ran it back to a pump (a large compressor on wheels with a pump attached...can't remember if it is Scale Structures, Finishing Touches or Evergreen) with a pipe line running from the pump into the irrigation pond...
Rod
First of all, gird up your loins and gather your nerve (Dutch courage NOT allowed) and take a trip down to your local fabric/sewing store. Take a look at various wale-width courduroy cloth, if you have a row crop in mind, or check out the fake fur if you want something more like a wheat field. The methods vary depending on your goal.
For row crops, pick a wale width close to 1' wide for your scale. And save some modeling time by getting it in a reasonably close shade of brown to represent the earth, although you can dye it if the only size that works is the wrong color. Cut to size of desired field and glue in place. I've had good luck with Elmer's White glue. Run a bead of glue along the TOP of one wale at a time, and sprinkle on some ground foam (the fine stuff for your N-scale) One quick and easy field with minimal mess and very little out of pocket.
The fake fur comes in a variety of colors, but I recommend a "straw" color for your starting point. For a late summer field, all that needs to be done is cut to size, glue it down, and trim to an appropriate scale heigth. For spring, you will have to dye it. Get a medium to dark green and an O-L-D cake pan; mix one teaspoon of dry dye to a half cup of alcohol (the cheapest stuff you can find will work quite nicely) until you have enough to get about 1/4" of liquid in the bottom of the pan. Lay the fur in the pan fur side up so that the dye creeps up the future field from the bottom, thus making the darker green at the bottom where nature puts it. When you like what you see, place the dyed fur on a HARD surface to dry. This point I cannot stress enough, you want a hard non-pourous surface, I use hard-glazed floor tile. Cut to size, glue it down, and trim to scale height. This also works very nicely for weeds, just don't trim as evenly.
Notes: You can use water in place of the alcohol, but dyeing and drying time are both somewhat longer and the dye penatration doesn't seem to be as uniform; save the water method for the weeds. For trimming to height, I use an old electric dog clipper, regular hair clippers also work.
Jack "The trolley nut" Priller
I looked for the coconut welcome mats and EVENTUALLY found one with no print. It was $12. I would of bought it (I'd like to get it cheaper though) but the base was a very thick rubber. I could see no way to adhere this to a module. They were also selling carpet squares 2 for a $1, so I thought I'd have nothing to lose by trying that first.
Using a haircutting scissors, I trimmed out two rows, keep one, trimmed two....ect. I also trimmed down the fibers (would of been about 2 men high in Nscale) and brushed it to give it a fuzzy look.
My next step is to dye it. Micheals sells a bottle of water based dye, so I'll try that before the Rit stuff.
I'll keep you posted.
Don