It has taken me longer than I thought it would to get going on my track landscaping project because I honestly just don’t know what I want to do. A lot of the track landscaping I’ve seen involves a lot of lush greenery, with a lot of trees and moss covered rock and brick walls and water features and such. Such projects look very beautiful, but my diorama is supposed to be south central California, which is not a particularly green area; so lots of deep rich green grass and deciduous trees isn’t what I want. But this part of the world where I was raised isn’t strictly desert either, and right now, with the bare cork and not much else, my track looks more like it’s in Phoenix than Inland SoCal. So I knew I needed to find a balance between brown and green, but I wasn’t sure how. I also wasn’t sure where to start! Well, yesterday I elected to start with one of the barest, least interesting parts of the track: the center of the corkscrew where the water tower sits; and today I made my first attempt at landscaping.
To make this area a little more topologically interesting, I thought I’d create a mound that tapered down to the track to both raise the water tower and give the area some dimension. I have had two pieces of inch thick pink insulation that I bought almost 2 years ago sitting in the basement that I’ve never done anything with, so I thought this might be an opportunity to get some use out of it.
My first step was simple enough: tape a few pieces of used white paper together with masking tape and slide them underneath the track to use a Sharpie to create a template. Moving a few things out of the way, I accomplished this is a matter of minutes. I took the paper template back out and placed it on top of the insulation and used a small razor knife to cut the pattern into the foam. Once that was done, out came my handy “hot wire” foam cutter. This is a great tool that makes short and easy work out of cutting things like this, and as lazy as I am, I decided to let the hot wires do the cutting rather than doing it with the razor knife. This pink insulation is actually quite dense and rather hard to cut with a knife; it’s high-quality stuff, and in fact I probably will not be using it again for projects like this because its simply too expensive, when I can get Styrofoam packing by the truckload from work for free, but again, I had this lying around for almost 2 years without using it, so I figured, waste not want not.
Once I had the shape cut out, I did a test fit into the center of the corkscrew to make sure it fit and then pulled it back out to start shaping. The wire cutter was brought to bear again, and this time I cut a sharp angle all around the edges of the shape to create the taper down to the edge of the inside of the track. This was done roughly by free-hand. Once done, I used a large piece of coarse, 60 grit sandpaper and ran it all along the foam to round it all out, creating a smooth mound with wavy edges. When I was done, it was perfectly imperfect: erosion, after all, does not produce anything like symmetry, and the rougher the shape looked, the more realistic. Of course this made quite a mess on the basement floor in the form of pink insulation dust, but my little Red Devil vacuum made short work of cleaning that up.
In order to simulate dirt, the next thing I did was slather the whole thing with cheap dark brown tempera paint with a cheap paint brush-why use something expensive when you don’t have too? When I was done, I had what looked like a giant mud pie.
OK, so now what? Well, here’s where I tried some new things that, if I did it over, I would probably do differently. The first thing I did was cut some white hobby glue with water and coated the whole “mud pie” with a coating glue and then covered it with the same type of gravel I used on the freeway project: a mixture of a ‘burnt” looking olive green and brown. This came out really nicely, and honestly, looking back, I wish I had stopped right there! What I had at the point was as very realistic looking dirt mount that needed little more than some shrubs and it would have been great.
But, I decided instead to press ahead with using a bag of Woodland Scenics “Underbrush.” The substrate, which was olive green in color, looked like it would create a good chaparral look-the aforementioned “shrubbery.” So here I coated the mound a second time with white glue from a spray bottle. This probably was not a good idea, because when I put the underbrush over the gravel it didn’t stick well. This resulted in my adding more and more glue, eventually coming to the realization that the sprayable white glue wasn’t creating the adhesion I needed. If I had skipped the gravel and tried to put the underbrush directly on the foam mound it would surely have worked better, but because I wanted to leave the look of some dirt showing through the greenery, I still thought I was on the right track.
Seeing that the white glue wasn’t sticking, I then decided the use what I probably should have used from the start: spray adhesive. This worked perfectly, and its too bad I wasted all that white glue-including my remaining sprayable white glue-so ineffectively, because the spray adhesive made all that underbrush stick like crazy! In fact, it worked too well…but I’ll come back to that in a minute.
In between all these steps there was a lot of down time to let the paint and the layers of glue dry. During that time, I decided it would be a good idea to disassemble the corkscrew section of the track. This kind of partial deconstruction will be unavoidable during these landscaping projects-what I’m trying to avoid is deconstructing the entire track, and frankly, I’m not completely sure I won’t wind up doing that anyway! But, while I had this one section apart, I took the opportunity to do a couple of other little jobs; I used my weathering chalk to “dirty-up” the gray plastic supports to make them look more like old concrete and less like shiny plastic. I also replaced some of the track sections with newer pieces and ran the sanding block along the rails of all of them to make sure they were gleaming clean. I have had trouble with the joints in this area causing power problems along the track, and figured this was the best opportunity I would have to spruce everything up.
Once my mound was dry enough I brought it from the back yard where I had been working on it with the spray glue back down the basement. Boy, was it green…really green! All that “underbrush” had stuck so well it looked like a giant furr ball. In fact, it was too green; I didn’t have any of the brown gravel showing through anymore, which was my original intention. Unfortunately, trying to “shave” it resulted in the substrate coming off in large gooey “clumps” thanks to my soaking everything in white glue trying to get it to stick in the first place. And that wasn’t satisfactory either…so, now what?
Well, I figured I’d just stick with the underbrush. Inserted it into the center of the corkscrew and rebuilt the track, and placed the water tower in the center. I topped it off with a little “garnish”, some little clumps of red and yellow wild flowers I picked up at Hobby Lobby placed at a few points right around the base of the tower. Aaaaand….
Well…I don’t know. It doesn’t look bad, I guess, but I think there is now too much contrast between the greenery of this mound and the rest of the track! Of course I plan to “green up” the rest of it as well, but not this much; I didn’t intend for this area to look quite so “lush.” But this is how it came out and for now I’m going to go with it. If I decide I hate it I can get rid of it and try something else, but for a first try, I guess it’s not too bad, and I learned a few things along the way.
And as added bonus to the day’s activities, I also added some new lengths of tall chain link fence along the edge of the spectator parking lot to prevent overly enthusiastic race fans from running across the track!
So, while the mound isn’t quite the vision I had, I do like that the water tower is now elevated an extra inch…and this reminds me I need to get busy making some decals because I want a logo on that water tower. That’s another big project that’s probably going to cost several hundred $$$’s because I’m probably going to have to buy a color inkjet printer to do it.
But that’s for later. My next step will be adding a grass mat to the central spectator area where the vendor tents are. Unfortunately this means all the figures and structures in these areas have to come up then they have to go back, so it will probably take a while, but I’ll document the process here and hopefully everything will go back together in a way that in pleasing to the eye!
What can I say but BRAVO ! It does look fantastic and came out well. I know what you mean about wanting a bit more of the gravel to come through and how it is working with glue and the adhesives. Somethings don’t stick enough and some things stick way to much! I’ve redone a lot of things on mine. Letting it sit for a while and coming back to it if need be is the best thing. I’ll go back and forth with oh, I like that, then later, not so much, then well, if I change one little thing I’ll like it more. The water tower is cool and creating an elevation was a great idea. It defiantly adds visual excitement to this section where you couldn’t do much to it. I have been trying different techniques myself. This is a terrific start and I’d say your doing it right. It’s a learning curve for sure working with the different materials and, for me, not making it look perfect, but natural.