Adding vegetation to a diorama
When we last left off in Part VI, I had just finished the plaster and dirt groundwork. Now it's time to make this Pacific jungle track come to life!
I started off adding small patches of static grass. I also added in a fallen log in the front corner, which was a twig found in a local park.
Static grass in place. Each clump added using tweezers and white PVA glue. |
Twig "fallen log" courtesy of my local park. |
I also wanted a small, stunted tree in the back corner, on top of the little hill. Now I could have built my own using twisted, sculpted metal wire covered in plaster. But I am also a firm believer in the fact that the most natural looking stuff is actually provided by Nature, so I used a suitably gnarled and twisted twig from the park again.
Another find at the local park. I could never paint bark this realistically! |
I purchased some laser-cut jungle palm leaves which were printed on paper. These came from www.jsworkmodel.com - I'd not used this before, but I thought it was worth a shot. Unfortunately, when they arrived the printed colours were pretty garish and over-bright. I started installing palm leaves one by one, but I wasn't impressed.
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I'll leave these instructions here in case you want to try your own. |
Paper palm leaves... Hmmm...Those colours are a bit much! |
Those bright colours are really too unrealistic. |
However, after a coat of matte paint, the vegetation improved considerably. So I would recommend them, they were cheap and easy to use, but you just need to tone them down a bit yourself.
I've added some links for similar products from Amazon at the end of this post. For the price, you can't go wrong.
A thin coat of green really helped tone down those leaves. Yellow tips still show through, giving some colour modulation. |
I had also purchased some resin palm leaves, which I airbrushed and was tremendously happy with. Unfortunately, they were way over-scale, and dominated the scene, even though they were supposedly for 1/35 modelling. Maybe if you had a larger vehicle they would work, let's not forget that this is a tiny car. Oh well, c'est la vie.
These look great! |
Ummm, no. That does not look right... |
So I dumped these and continued using the paper leaves. Much more in scale, and much less likely to overtake the story!
Slightly more boring palms, but definitely in-scale now. |
I also added some little clumps of green sponge material to suggest moss - you can see this in the photo directly above. This is Woodland Scenics Coarse Turf (Light Green) - good versatile stuff, and very useful to have around.
Finally, I used varnish to make wet mud and puddles in the tyre tracks on the trail. I had hoped to have actual puddles with depth, but the plaster was too porous and the varnish kept soaking into the wooden plinth. Not 100% what I had hoped for, but the wet muddy ground still looks good. I also added wet mud to the car's wheels using plaster, paint and then a coat of varnish for wetness.
Varnish added to replicate wet mud. |
One little puddle remained underneath the car. |
I finished up the jungle vegetation with some random (tiny!) bits of torn leaf and strands of dried out grass that I found on the ground walking around the block.
So that's it for vegetation. Come back next time for Part VIII when I finish the final steps. I hope this is helpful and gives you ideas for your own dioramas.
Until then, keep experimenting!
Cheers,
Dave
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