scenery base over foam

[basementdweller]

I have my track laid and I am ready to start scenery.

What do you use over the pink foam?

My last layout I used plaster cloth, but I have ruled that out due to the expense. I thought of just roughing up and then painting the pink foam, my test area turned out very well in fact, but I would still have to hide the seams.

 

[Muddy Creek]

I use Liquid Nails One-Step Spackling over foam where necessary. Mainly to fill seams and to sculpt rock faces. It is a bit pricy but it is super-lightweight, an important consideration for my layout and will fill in your seams quite nicely. I've got some areas of foam that are just painted (non-oil based) and real, local dirt applied. In some areas, I troweled on a thin coat of the spackling to give it a rough, rocky surface.

For most of the mountains and hillsides I use two-part foam poured over bubblewrap, reinforced with fiberglass screening and laid over a few scrap pieces of pink foam or wadded up newspaper to form the contours. It becomes self-supporting in a few minutes and I treat the results the same as I do the the pink foam, using the spackling to smooth the seams.

Wayne

 

[Fred_M]

Well, white glue, as wet glue, stick stuff to foam as well as it sticks it to plaster or anything else. I cover it with acrylic paint, dirt, sand, ground foam, and flock grass. You can use spackle, plaster/paper towels, anything on it. The pores in the foam allow almost anything to stick to it mechanically bonded. So just treat it like plaster cloth. You can even crave rock strata into it and paint it, it looks like rock. Just don't use enamels or any oil based paint as most of the thinners in them melt foam. Now I heard and tried melting streams with spray paint. It works and a spray bottle of water pretty much stops the paint eating the plastic. You then wipe it up quickly. Do this outdoors BTW or you will die from the fumes. Don't smoke and all that either. It's fun but learn on scraps. Fred

 

[TrainClown]

I would use paper mache'. This is cheap and jumps gaps and covers anything you want to to make the base out of. Buy some vinyl wall paper paste and your away. Use news print.

Paste a whole sheet of paper and then fold it in half and cut it into 1 inch strips. Unfold each strip and smooth it in place, over lapping each piece by a bit. A small tub of paste goes a long way.

Let me know if you would like more details on how to do this. It's easy, quick, light, takes trees, paint and stuff real good, and is cheap.

TrainClown

 

[Ray Marinaccio]

To hide seams, I filled in the large ones by gluing in bits of foam.
The rest, I took drywall joint compound and applied it with my finger to blend the areas together.
Latex caulking will also work.
Then paint it all with a couple of coats of latex paint.
Next will come dirt, ground foam or whatever your preference.