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Back2Basics
PART 13 – Scenery
Section 1: An Introduction
By Kathy Millatt MMR
You’ve built your baseboards, laid your track and now you are staring at some clean pieces of plywood or foam and wondering where to go next! Scenery can feel very daunting to a newcomer but is actually very forgiving. It’s easy to correct mistakes and redo sections so the best advice is to give it a go and not worry.
Basics
The first thing to do is consider your model and where it is based. Is it desert or forest, flat or mountainous, rocky or muddy, arid or wet? All of these impact on your scenery and how you build it. The good news is that the basics are the same regardless.
I always think of my scenery in terms of foreground, midground and background. I try and make my foreground the most detailed. Viewers will be drawn to this first and naturally assume that the rest of the layout is as detailed.
In reality, everything blurs with distance and you cannot see weeds or details after a certain point. We can use our scenery to add a feeling of depth that mirrors reality. My backgrounds are therefore more generic, quicker to model and less detailed. The midground is a halfway house with some leaves and details but not too many.
Process
Here's an overview of the scenery process I prefer to use:
1. Start with a substructure that acts as a firm base for your scenery. Obviously, mountains look very different to prairies but you can use the same materials for the substructure but just build them up differently.
2. At this point you need to mock in the roads, rivers and buildings so that they have the correct height and flat areas for the water or road/building surface.
3. Next up is an earth layer that hides the base (which is often white, blue or pink!). This can be as simple
as paint or, in deserts, can be the bulk of the
scenery work.
4. I tend to do the water, roads and buildings at this
point. The buildings are not attached and can be removed for messy work but it enables me to work out exactly where everything will fit and get it to bed down well.
5. After this I add in trees, then bushes, then grass.
6. The final step is the details that brings it all to life, from wildlife to people, rubbish and detritus to
weathering.
Substructure
The first step in scenery is to start with a suitable base. This doesn’t need to be anything fancy and can build on whatever the baseboards are made from. Depending on your baseboards, here are a few thoughts to get you going so that your scenery is not totally flat:
• Foam is easily worked with bread knives or hot wire tools and can be built up or subtracted from making it very versatile. If you or your friends have had any building work recently then you may have a ready supply of insulation foam. You can use the white expanded polystyrene too but it will need a hard outer layer as it is a bit soft.
• Plywood needs to be built up as it is generally too flat but it is a solid start. I usually use Sculptamold which is a plaster/paper maché mix to build up slight undulations and foam for larger hills.
• If you have open areas between framing you can use plaster cloth which is easily available online or from shops like Hobbycraft. I put scrunched up newspaper underneath and lay the plaster cloth on then spray with water. I find this is less messy than trying to dunk plaster cloth in water and put it in place.
August 2018 - ROUNDHOUSE 15