Sunday, February 21, 2016

Grassing things up - and some outbuildings for Mr Griffith's farm

I'm awaiting some additional material to finish the dam for the mill stream so instead of working on the mill stream itself I've been spending some time with the static grass applicator over the last few days. 
Some areas of the layout hadn't gotten static grass applied - in some others, like this section just north of Randolph, the static grass had gotten pretty beaten up during the course of building, and rebuilding the layout. 
A quick squirt of hairspray, a misting with water to create some relative humidity, and a few minutes with the static grass applicator and the refreshed grass (left) looks much better than the old, dusty faded stuff (right):
I also planted some grass around the highway underpass just north of Waterbury - this is right at the end of the peninsula and is one of the first scenes visitors see when coming downstairs. For some reason I'd never "grassed" the embankments on both sides of the railroad overpass - so while I had the static grass applicator out I took care of this area. 
I had several visitors from Richmond yesterday - Mike Garber, Mike Pulaski and Joshua Blay stopped by and we had a nice visit. They arrived during this static grass party - Mike G. and Joshua hadn't tried using static grass so we had an impromptu hands-on clinic. They did some grass around the Derby & Ball wood yard - they did a great job. I hope they picked up a useful tip or two! 
I also realized that I'd never mentioned the outbuildings I've been adding to Griffiths Farm. In addition to the hay barn, "Ol' Man Griffith" now has a corn crib and a small tractor shed. Looks like there's some activity in the barn yard. (As a side note, I need to clean up my modeling desk!)


The last stretch of static grass I've done is along the mill stream - which I'll show in a future post - and in the area behind the curve between the mill stream scene and Randolph. Since this was in the background I was careful to use the shorter (2mm and 4mm) grass instead of the long stuff I tend to use in the foreground scenes. 


5 comments:

Barry Karlberg said...

Nice work, Marty. Your grass really makes the layout come alive.

Barry

Barry Karlberg said...

Nice work, Marty. Your grass really makes the layout come alive.

Barry

Chris Adams said...

Looking great, as usual. And that old grass doesn't look all that bad - just in keeping with late autumn. By the way, sorry if I missed it, but is the layout track work fully done and operational so you're able to focus on scenery now?

CVSNE said...

thanks Barry!

mike-g said...

Marty, thanks for letting us visit and for the hands on clinic. Joined the blog and hoping to build on what I learned Saturday.