Building the Mountain

The past week I have been hard at work building the Silver Mountain itself. My rock factory has been humming at peak capacity, producing rock castings from Lightweight Hydrocal. I have ran through three half-gallon containers of the stuff before running out Sunday night, and have attached all of the castings to the mountainside using Sculptamold. Here are some pictures of the current state of the mountain.

After attaching and coloring the first batch of rock faces, I started to apply a layer of tan paint and gluing grass on the mountaintop. To my annoyance, I realized that I had really no way of sprinkling grass on the near-vertical surfaces between the rock castings. I did place some lichen bushes in those areas, but decided to add some more rock castings to the side of the mountain to cover the majority of the near-vertical areas. Modeling Colorado, I thought it would not be realistic to have too much lush undergrowth on the side of the mountain, and that rock faces would be much more prototypical. So I got my factory back up and running, and as a result you are seeing uncolored rocks mixed with painted ones in the picture.

Regarding painting the rocks, I decided to follow the "leopard" painting method promoted by Woodland Scenics for their Earth Colors pigments. It was dead easy and I was shocked at how good the colors turned out to be with so little effort, and on a first try. I just diluted three of their colors, umber, slate gray, and black, with water, splashed some spots on the rock with the two first colors and applied a thin wash of 16x diluted black and that was it. I ran out of the colors and ordered some more, and should be in a position to finish the rocks tonight.

Regarding the base pain and the grass, I kind of wished I had picked a darker tan tone for the base layer. My original choice, Arizona Tan by Behr, was picked with the New Mexico landscape in mind, and looks less well-placed in Colorado. So I just may pick up gray and darker brown base colors next time I'm at Home Depot. I also tried using a spray bottle for applying Scenic Cement over the sprinkled turf mix, but may go with an eyedropper bottle in the next round.

One major lesson was that I wished the mountain wasn't quite as big, and that I had built less steep sides to it. Now I won't have many places besides the top to put trees on, and I have to put in more vertical stone faces than I had planned. I'll keep that in mind for the next time - and as a matter of fact, already applied that lesson to my smaller mountainside in the other corner of the layout.