Rock Face

The mountain loop goes along the rock face. I tried to model the granite of the Front Range here. This is built from styrofoam blocks for the most part, covered with a thin coat of plaster. It is easier to build these things in modules on a table, then place them and tie them together. It took me a while to get it all together.

The styrofoam is packing material from electronic components. The best part is it's free. It also has some sort of shape with voids and fills that can be sculpted into something. The pictures below show the area in a little more detail. There are four blocks of foam: the two knobs; the shelf in front of them; the other shelf to the left.

I plastered and painted the components, then placed them and joined them. There are gaps between the parts and I filled these with polyfil as something to hold the plaster. I also used the cat litter and Mod Podge glue to hold things together at the joints, along with some bamboo skewers. These work well when your work is a cobbled as mine.

The plaster is brushed on. The consistency can be controled by the mix ratio; it is possible to make some pretty stiff stuff that can be sculpted and molded. Also; various textures can be added with cat litter, sand, saw dust and wood chips.

All of the above work well for texture, but cat litter seems to be the best, I suppose because it is originally rock and fractures properly. I screen it to get ballast-size pieces and use the coarser bits to make tallus and rock falls. I spray the texture with a 50/50 mix of water and Mod Podge and allow it to dry in place. There are a couple of problems with this: the first is that cat litter is clay, so when it gets wet it gets mushy so you want to leave it alone until it has set; the other problem is that Mod Podge does not take water-thinned acrylics well - they tend to bead up - so the coloring needs to be fairly thick initially.