Growing Hills

After track painting, ballasting is another thing that logically should be done before tunnels encroach, but I reckon this is pretty chicken and eggy. You need embankments to stick ballast to, and if hills don't go in first you end up covering your nice ballast in glue and plaster. I'll probably grow as much scenery as I can, ballast, and then close off the tunnels.

My preferred method for building scenic forms involves chicken wire (so you can mold the hillsides till they look right) and Woodland Scenics plaster cloth (because it's fast, sets into a hard shell, and is relatively mess-less.

On the other side of the coin, that method is also relatively heavy (remember that the layout is a featherweight so far) and relatively expensive. The plaster sometimes cracks and will often shed dust over time.

So this time I'm going to try a lattice of thin card to build the forms (and boy does it look pretty appalling in these pictures) stuck together by the cheapest, stringiest, nastiest hot glue gun that you can buy for $5 at The Warehouse:

This worked reasonably well - although it looks pretty flimsy, the hardshell on top should add strength.

With the hot glue gun and some strips cut from cardboard collected from the recycling over the past month, this is pretty fast to build and tweak. You may also note some black foamboard forms in place for the road and some of the buildings of Wassen.

Now to coat the skeleton with some lightweight skin. The first experiment was with pages from an old phonebook (again, borrowed from the recycling).  In the blue plastic tub, I mixed approx 50:50 PVA and warm water with a few drops of dishwashing liquid and stirred it all up. The ripped up bits of phonebook paper were dunked and applied a few layers deep.

We'll find out tomorrow just how stiff this is...