Lost in the Oakbound Woods Part 2: Texture and undergrowth.

Last week I wrote about picking up the long-standing project to make scenery for The Woods figures photography. If you missed it, you can find it here: Oakbound Woods part 1

This week I'm picking up with the first layers of cover. Sadly there's been no word on the master castings in the meantime.

First thing to do was to cover most of the boards in earth.

 Since I'm going for a rich, forest loamy, mulchy soil, 'earth' in this case is.... PG tips! Straight out of the tea bags. Quite a lot of bags. Tea looks great for kind of terrain I'm going for, but watch out if you have any kind of damp atmosphere going on as, obviously, it is prone to mould. I live on a boat. There IS damp! To counter this these have been given a very thorough dose of varnish. This also acted as a nice adhesive for the second layer of ground cover, fake leaves. Again, lots of them. It's important when dropping leaves all over the scenery to make sure they fall as they would in a real forest, building up around the bases of trees and bottom of slopes. Then I drybrushed the exposed rocks with a few layers of mid brown building to brown/white, going back into the shading with black washes afterwards.

 

Here I've added the river that will run along the base of the valley, just painted boards with a sheet of Perspex laid across the top for depth/reflection. I'll probably use some PVA to add ripples next week. A you can see, there is some water falling down the slopes too.

 

The next step is to make the branches of the trees, paper clips set into the trunks and covered with milliput, and the foliage that covers the slopes- ferns and bracken mainly.