Country Road Model Base

Step 1 I always use Ikea picture frames for my dioramas. They are extremely cheap, come with either natural wood or colour painted edges, have a solid styrene sheet base making them ideal for diorama work and are, so to speak, 'ready made'. For this one I used strips of packing foam to simulate the higher edges of the roadside and cut them to shape with a hobby knife. They are glued to the styrene sheet with small dabs of Zap-a-Gap Medium (green) CA.

Step 2 For the far edge I used 4 commercial larch trees from the Model Scene range. They looked just ok height wise in comparison to the 1/35 figure in the foreground.

Step 3 Next, I started the work on the base layer using Apoxie Sculpt. In this case the 'Natural' colour but any colour could be used since the whole lot will be paint over-sprayed anyhow. Since I intended to have most of the Apoxie covered with other ground materials, I did not make much work of detail into the Apoxie layer. Just spreading it out into a roughly 0,5m thick layer, making some shapes into it with thumbs and forefingers (always liberally use Apoxie's own Safety Solvent since this effectively helps to keep the Sculpt from sticking to your fingers while working !!). I initially planned on doing all of the ground details like stones, grass, etc into the still soft Apoxie but I quickly found out the drying time of the Apoixie wouldn't allow me to finish all of it before the stuff hardened out.

While the Apoxie was still soft, I pressed in links of Dragon tank tracks to simulate the tracks' impressions in the soft sand of the centre of the road.

In the above picture, you only see a very small portion of the ground detail stuff, due to the above mentioned lack-of-time. Step 4 I resorted to Plan B, doing the airbrush painting of the ground colour first and then apply all of the 'nature' with the help of thinned down PVA glue (80% water + 20% PVA). However, I first drilled holes for the small fence poles. The poles were made from Evergreen rod with 1.6mm dia, which I 'roughened' by chopping off small bits here and there making them look more natural. Though not done in this picture, I also drilled the holes to accommodate the 4 trees.

The entire area was airbrushed with varying Tamiya acrylics sand/earth tones.

Step 5 To finally 'fill in the nature' I used the following materials: various grades of Woodland Scenics ballast, Green Line grass tufts in varying sizes, Reality In Scale's Pine Forest Scatter, Green Line yellow flower tufts, Verlinden photo-etch barbed wire and JMC 0,3mm lead wire for the wire on the fence poles.

All ballast, grass tufts and scatter materials were applied with the above mentioned thinned PVA method. I always use an old pipette to apply the PVA liquid in drops that spread out nicely around the area where the drops fall. Overlapping drops is a good idea. Let this dry overnight after which the PVA solution has hardened so much that actually none of the material falls off even if you fully turn the base upside down and give it a few taps. After everything had dried down I gave the sandy parts of the road a few additional whiffs of airbrushed Tamiya acrylics mixed light sand-grey tones here and there for highlighting, during which all the Woodlands ballast grains stayed solidly fixed by the way. 5