I have been focused on completing some of the basic scenery lately. Minus coloring rock castings, it has been coming along nicely. The rock coloring has been a struggle. At last week’s Great Train Expo show in Denver I picked up Darryl Huffman’s DVD titled “Easy Rock Casting and Coloring”. I had previously bought a back drop painting DVD that he produced and I was very pleased with how he can make something that seems overwhelming achievable by a completely non-artistic type person like me. I also have Dave Frary’s book called “How To Build Realistic Model Railroad Scenery”

There seems to be a trend towards starting with a black base and dry brushing color on top of the rock face versus the more traditional staining techniques. Staining rock castings can be challenging due to different batches of plaster accepting stain differently and it can be difficult to create a stain with the right amount of pigment. I was anxious to try the new dark base technique but had mixed results. I think the pure black base from Darryl’s technique is too stark. Dave recommends immediately dry brushing an earth color over the wet black to tone the black down and I prefer this approach.

You can see the progress in the two pictures above. There are still many layers of scenery to go but it is nice to start to get a sense of how things are going to look. The rock faces in the left picture were created using the stark black base and the ones on the right were done using the more muted dark earth base.

Another thing I have been very pleased with was the decomposed granite material I grabbed up near Estes Park a couple of weekends ago. When it was wet is seemed too organic but once I dried and sifted it, it was perfect with a great texture.

Things are starting to take shape and I have learned a lot in the last couple of weeks. I look forward to creating more detailed postings about some of my techniques.