TERRAIN JOURNAL: PART THE THIRD

 

Two weeks later and I'm back to chipping away at my new terrain concept. You may recall I have built two hill tiles but I've decided to forge ahead with the relatively flat sections first becasue I'm reckoning that all my hill sections need to be built at the same time to ensure they match up correctly. So, I went ahead and spray glued the synthetic fur to the rest of the tiles using Sellys Kwik Grip spray adhesive which worked fine.

Using my Wahl dog clippers with a No: 3 comb I knocked all the fur down to a more manageable level. You really need to persist with shaving it down and ignore those thoughts that the longer fur looks cool - it doesn't work well in the long run. It really doesn't have to be very long at all to give a great grass like effect so ... shorter is better. The result on the first pass is an even crop-like effect.

 

Left is after No:3 clipping and right is the original fur length.

Close-up after the No:3

The next step was to go back over the lot in a more haphazard and uneven but thorough pass with the No:2 comb. After that, switch down to a No:1 and stab more randomly and slightly less frequently. For both of these passes I made sure I hit each patch from at least two angles to catch the lay of the fibers and avoid a mechanical, regular look to my patches.

You can see from the above image how much fiber is lifted with the No:2 and No:1 passes. I kept my Dyson to hand, cleaning up after each tile and being sure to suck up all the fibers from the pile.

 

Above left is the more natural and random fiber effects after I was done with the clippers and the right hand image is of a tile after the first No:3 pass.

I trimmed on the sides of my road/tracks and tomorrow I'll be hitting those sections with caulking and my aggregate mix.