GREENING the FIELDS

 

Okay, starting from this dry looking coir cut out I determined to change the natural fibers to young, green shoots for my 28mm scatter terrain. This approach is because the coir mats (to my mind) tend to convey a ripened wheat effect at for 28mm figures, it's too low for that. Lower means 'younger' which means greener - no matter what the crop. This lot is all based on ply-wood and is cut and glued rubber based coira mat using PVA - very secure. So, before moving to texture the base, I needed to green this lot up.

Painting the perimeter section separate from the inner crop sections, I started with the outer edges before stippling the paint onto and into the top. If you have an air brush or even a spray gun (if you can be bothered setting it up) you'd make shorter work of the first application than I did. I used stiff, pig's bristle brushed to stab at and work the paint in as deep as I could - which took a while.

I used four shades of green from the Josonjas range. At one point when painting the top, I experimented with diluting the paint and even tried spraying a section with isopropyl alcohol to get better penetration. This is a waste of time. These craft paints have a lot of water already in them and in the end, it was more efficient and effective to leave the paint well enough alone and use it straight up.

 

The coir takes paint extremely well and dries very quickly. As I was working on two crop sections I could cycle back to the start and get stuck in with the next application. The first colour Green Oxide was the most thorough base coat, and subsequent colours (Sap Green - Light Green and Moss Green) were applied in a heavy dry-brush, a mid dry-brush and a light dry-brush in that order.

The Moss Green was a surprising colour. I was going to hit the final touches with yellow mixed with light green but the Moss Green is more like a tan mushroom soup like colour which you can see on my pallet mix to the right(above) and left (below). It softened and broke down the regularity of the scheme and really tied everything together well (I think).
 

I gave the boundary edges of the crops a wider than usual space in order that there would be room for a future fence or wall section or two. When texturing, the outer edges used sand and tile grout only - as opposed to my usual stony mix. This will allow the fence or walls sections to sit more flush with the surface. I won't be building those walls any time immediately but am thinking of gluing rolled and stamped DAS air-drying clay sheets to a foam board core.

I tend to work on the principle that 'nature abhors a straight line'. Nevertheless, my recent experiments with raising the coir mat effect to 30mm and now painting them will see larger crops with inner square sections which can removed to let units pass through.