The following pictures show my third attemps in building some more hedgerow for the Normandy and Western Europe. My first attemps can be found here , the secound here. This time I intended to combine the technics used for my secound series with the use of real twigs to simulate bigger bushes and small trees and real earth for the base.
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Work in Progress |
Again the terrainpieces have to be heavy because I want them to sink to the ground when I use them on my fur mat. So I used again plaster to do the bases. I also added some of my stone walls for three of the pieces.
I mixed up the plaster with less water and put the wet material on a sheet of polysteren. I pressed some real small stones into the wet plaster and let the pieces dry. First I tried to sprinkle sand on the the surface, but the plaster dries to soon and the sand didn't adhere enough. Then I added a mix of black color, sand and woodglue with a big old brush. With this mix I coverd base with the exeption of the stones and the walls
In my last summer vacation in the Netherlands I collected some dead and dried twigs from some bushes near the coast. I used some bigger and well grown pieces as trees and some cut offs as the wooden trunks of bushes. I used a hot glue gun to mount the twigs to the base.
Before the glue became cold and hard I tried to form some kind of roots with the glue by the use of a toothstick.
Because I didn't used the usual black plaster I had to basecoat the bases with a darkbrown color.
In the next step I drybrushed the stones and the roots of the trees with an off white (very light ochre) color.
By drybrushing the structure of the glue with the off white too, the roots became more visible and gave a nice effect.
After the drybrushing I had to paint the earth around the stones in a dark brown again.
In my first attempts I imitated the earth by painting
it in different brown and beige paints and added some flock nearly everywhere. This time I
used real earth from my garden and (again) the ready brought flock called Waldboden
(forest ground).
I applied a mix of water and woodglue (50:50) with an old brush. Then I
partially sprinkled the wet glue with the flock and then the earth in irregular pattern.
The earth:
The flock:
Then the grey drybrushed stones got some coloring with different shades of inks in the colors umbra, sienna and black. This enriches the colors. When truely dry I dusted parts of the earth areas, the stones and the lower parts of some twigs with different earthy shades of pigment colors. This helps to tie all parts together and achieved a very natural look.
The use of dry pigments is one of the things that helped me to improve the realistic look of my painted models (buildings, terrain or vehicle alike) in the last year.
The following pictures show one of my piece with the groundwork done - ready for adding foliage.
Again I built the bushes and shrubs with a very rough blue floss (used as filtermaterial for pond pumps) as the basic material. I spraypainted the floss with a spraycan in terracotta brown and a very light "dust" of a light grey.
The bushes are done as described for the second set of hedgerows.
For the foliage of the trees I spread the floss to be thin and weblike.
Now it's time to flock the floss. Once again I used glue from a spraycan, matt varnish from a spraycan and the leaves from NOCH to do the foliage.
It is a good idea to give the flocked floss one or two coats of matt varnish from a spraycan to fixate the leaves.
I used allround glue (UHU Alleskleber) to fixate the foliate floss on top of the twigs. The following pictures shows various pieces before and after adding the foliage (leaved floss).
In a next step I used a natural material called seamoss (Seemoos oder Meerschaum in German). I covered the seamoos with NOCH leaves by the use of glue and varnish from a spraycan. After serious drying I cut many small pieces from the big ones. This small pieces of seamoss were glued into the leave coverd floss with the allround glue (UHU). This gave the trees (and some bushes) more volume, some transparency and for my taste a more realistic look.
Before adding the seamoss:
After adding the seamoss:
After adding the folige to the trees and the bushes it was time to the do some last finishing touches:
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adding some small pieces of flocked seamoss to the base as brushwood |
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gluing some patches of (longer) static grass to the base |
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do some drybrushing in different shades of bright ochre on the patches of long grass |
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paint the trunks and some stones of the walls with dry pigments to give bent the different parts together and add some differences in colors |
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The 8 finished pieces of hedgerows of my third set |
No. One:
No. Two:
No. Three:
No. Four:
No. Five:
No. Six:
No. Seven:
No. Eight:
No. Eight:
The mimiature shown in the pictures above is a 28 mm Grenadier from Artizan and gives an impression of scale.
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Some detail shots |
will follow soon
... FIN