I thought some of you might be interested in seeing the process I use to make a dirt road, once the route of the roadway is established and prepped.
Roadwork
Step one: Paint. I’ve used a thick paint (the Behr stuff from Home Depot that has a primer and paint in one). This stuff is like painting with glue, and I lay it on really thick.
Step two: Add texture. I use dry pre-colored sanded grout. I’m not going to tell you the color, because everyone perceives color a little differently, and because the color of dirt in the area you’re modeling will vary. Go with your eye on this. You’ll find the sanded grout in the aisle with the ceramic tile supplies at your local home improvement store.
Don’t worry at this point about it being “pretty.” Just get it on there, and make sure the whole roadway is covered. It will get smoothed out some in the next step.
Note that I said I use this stuff dry, just like putting on any other scenery texture. I know other folks who mix it with water, and apply it with a putty knife and/or spatula. I’ve never tried this … yet.
Step three: Smooth. Using a very soft brush, gently smooth and shape the road surface. I try to make most of my brush strokes go in the direction of travel. Try not to move so much of the grout around that you expose the sub-road. If you do, just push some of the grout back. Also, this is a dirt road, so don’t make the surface perfect. It should have small rough spots, holes and undulations.
By the way, for nice soft brushes, I get makeup brushes at the grocery store or Walmart.
Step four: There’s not enough moisture in the paint to completely secure the grout. To permanently fix the grout to the layout, I use the same technique as for ballasting track: using a mister, I saturate the grout with “wet water” and then come back with another mister of diluted matte medium.
For wet water, I have the best luck with an alcohol/water mix — about a 1:3 mix of 70% isopropyl alcohol and tap water. For matte medium, Scenic Express has absolutely the best product. I get their premixed in gallon jugs. I lay this on pretty heavy, too — enough so that the scenery turns a milky white. If I’ve put enough wet water on first, the matte medium will soak completely into the scenic material and once dry, it completely disappears. And, my scenery stays on the layout!
Working with Stains
I mentioned yesterday that I was working on the coloring of the passenger platform. I had used a base color, mixing two shades of gray/brown (“Bittersweet Chocolate” and Raw Umber), then sorta dry-brushed Driftwood stain over that, and then planned to wash that with a medium-brown weathering stain. The result was not quite brown enough for my taste, so this morning I added a wash of barn red stain.
I also used cottage white stain to tone down the light green, flowing it carefully into the green paint. I also dry-brushed the same stain onto the dark green areas and the roof.
Planting a Building
There’s a small shed/office adjacent the yard that straddles the joint between the two sections of the Corinna benchwork, so it will need to be removable, yet it still needs to look as if it’s permanently installed. The shed also needed to be raised up to track level.
I started that process by scraping the temporary scenery away from the area that the building would occupy, and used some cork roadbed to build up the terrain in that area.
My next step was to remove the pins holding the cork in place, and apply a liberal coat of my base color paint. While this was still wet, I placed the shed carefully, and sprinkled a layer of ballast trackside, and placed “dirt” and greenery around the sides and rear of the building. Then, I sprayed the area with wet water, followed by the diluted matte medium. The result is a removable building that looks as if the scenery grew up around it.
