Model Railroad Scenery Techniques: Creating Vegetation

When you look around the world besides trees and grass, you'll see a lot of waste high nondescript vegetation, it's something that's really easy to add to your layout and adds a lot of visual interest to any scene. And best of all, you can do a whole hillside in virtually no time. To start off, you need something called poly fiberfill. This is the stuff that quilters will use inside of quilts, you can buy it white as this stuff was in spray painted, you can buy it in the shades of lighter green, darker green, even black. In fact, you can buy it in larger quantities if you want to if you're going to do a lot of scenery all at once.

To get started. All you need to do is pinch off a few small pieces of the poly fiberfill. And these are pieces that are not much larger than about a nickel, and you'll want to tease them out as as fine as you can. And then for a spray booth, I'll use just a cardboard box top and in fact, I will spray a little bit of hairspray into this to kind of hold the pieces of poly fiberfill in there. And again, you don't want to do too many at once.

Maybe just two or three. Tease, the finer you tease them the better your vegetation will look. I'll do three here. And then the key ingredient is cheap hairspray. The cheaper the hairspray, the better because it has more binders in it that will hold the ground foam that we'll be using for vegetation.

So you'll wanna spray, your pieces of poly fiberfill and really get them nice and saturated with the hairspray. Turn them over and do a little bit more. Then while the pieces still wet. And it's best to use tweezers for this because otherwise you'll wind up with the foam all over your fingers. You put into a little container I'm using ground foam from Woodland Scenics.

Companies like Knock make some great stuff here. This is called Vald Bowden, which is forest floor grass, or bloom and weisen grass, which is metal grass, I'm using Woodland Scenics ground foam, you'll dump this into your into your ground foam and literally shake it. And what you wind up with is something that will resemble a bush. But again, the finer this is, the better it is. And if you can put this on your layout while the hairspray is still wet, it will really adhere to the layout very well.

And again, tease it out, kind of make it nondescript vegetation. If you want to you can sprinkle some different colors onto it, I've got a brown mix here, that will kind of look a little bit like some burned or dead leaves. We'll do another one with a lighter green. And again, you want to saturate your poly fiberfill. This is kind of blowing all over the box top but that's fine.

You just want to make sure that the foam adheres to the poly fiberfill well. Put this in the lighter green, there's two pieces there, but that's fine. Shake it up. And once again, apply it to the layout and the smaller these pieces are, the better they're going to look and you can tease these again, the hairspray helps hold things together. You can tease these into all sorts of shapes, keeping them low to the ground looking like that nondescript bush or weeds or the vegetation that you don't really know what it is.

You can also buy some Colored foam. This happens to be yellow if you want to sprinkle that on there to, to make it look like little blossoms, flower blossoms. You can do a whole hillside in a matter of hours on your layout. It adds a lot of texture and a lot of eye candy so to speak and fills in some of those blank spots that aren't grass and our trees.