Green Fingers

Continuing the scenic work on Slugworth we moved onto bushes and trees. Bushes and undergrowth is represented with a variety of scenic materials, including rubberised horsehair, various teased-out fibrous materials, and even some lichen. These were covered in scatter and ground foam in various shades of green, the idea being to give an impression of different types of plant rather than any attempt to model specific types. It's a messy and surprisingly time-consuming task, but adds a lot of texture to the landscape.



The trees are all Joshua's work. I've mentioned the scenic demo exhibition stand by Roy Hickman before, who gets kids involved making scenic items. Joshua has made a couple of trees under his instruction, which use real twigs, rubberised horsehair or teased-out fibres stuck on with hot glue, and scatter material fixed with cheap hairspray. Then he had a homework project to model the rain forest (no, I've no idea why) - so he used the same technique to make a number of trees.

We'd kept the model thinking the trees would come in useful, so now we have uprooted them and replanted those that fitted best onto Slugworth, along with those he'd made on Roy's demo stand. Some got a refresh of scatter along the way. Such a simple method, however I think they are really impressive, and better than any trees I've ever made from twisted wire...



Meanwhile, the buildings are getting bedded in to the factory yard. Although they fit into the cobbled yard which minimises any visible gap, we did find the long thin "tufts" of static grass we made on the foil worked well along the edges of the buildings.



At the end of the yard we wanted a gravel/cinder ground finish, which we simply achieved sprinkling sand onto PVA glue. This was then painted dark grey with acrylics. Joshua then crushed a lump of real coal with a hammer, which was used to make a pile of coal outside the boiler house.



Things are really coming together now. Just some final details to add, although they can take a lot of time...