With the backdrop painted, I started in on the foreground scenery. I started by building up the hills. I followed Paul Scoles’ method of using scraps of foam and masking tape to lay out the hills:
I then covered these supports with Woodland Scenics plastic cloth. Nice stuff to work with. After laying out all the hardshell, I then went back and gave everything a coat of the earth colour latex paint and a sprinkling of Woodland Scenics earth and green tone ground cover foam.
This is where I discovered my biggest mistake so far on the module. Compared to the colours of the ground foam, the trees on the backdrop were far too blue in colour and everything just looked wrong.
I quickly learned a good rule passed on by Rob Spangler that you should always match the colours on the backdrop and the foreground scenery. For most of us who do not want to dye our own ground foam, this means selecting a colour palette for the backdrop based on the foam colours. I took samples of the ground foam with me and returned to the craft store. There I was able to find several different greens that better matched the foam colours. These new greens were much more olive and yellow in colour. I then added a new layer of trees onto the backdrop (made a lot more difficult since the hills were now in place. The scene came together much better with these new olive-coloured trees.
Here’s a picture of the module after the change in backdrop colours and after finishing the shoulders of ballast:
This time I followed the advice of Boone Morrison and Linda Sand and used rubbing alcohol to wet the ballast before gluing it down with matte medium. This method works extremely well and I will use it from now on for ballast.
As you can see in the photograph, I’ve just started to go back and add the texture layer to the scenery.