Making Scenery Using Blue Insulating Foam.

Part 2

OK, finally I pretty much finished the mesa project for my layout.
This time I built a mountain with 2 tunnels for the club layout to replace the one that we no longer have.
We decided to call our mountain 'Veterans Hill'.

Materials.
2 X 8 sheet of insulation foam. This can be purchased at places like Home Depot or Lowe's. Color does not matter, Home Depot carries the blue color foam. The foam runs about $5 -6 a sheet.
Interior latex paint. Recommend a brown blend.
Dry wall mud.
Then just your supply of scenery items, dirt, grass, etc.
The tools you will need are a box cutter or exacto knife, some type of carving tool, I used my digging bit on my exacto, paint, 80 grit sanding paper and the MOST important tool, your shop vac.
This IS a VERY messy project and a shop vac is key. Do this project in a garage or work shop.

The process.
As always, click on the picture to enlarge.
For this project I used leftover pieces from the mesa project for my layout.
Also, I used a different product to cover holes and contour the mountain. Dry wall mud. This worked out great. The mud is easy to use, inexpensive and very easy to work with when it hardens.

This is the area of the layout the moutain is to be located.

It was a good area as it has yet to have scenery done and it will hide the spur that will go to a future yard.

Using large & small pieces of foam, you can see the rough sanded results. Again I used Elmer's wood glue to attach the layers.

Once you have the rough cut done, for this project, I had to cut tunnels. So before I started to mud, I lined up the mountain on the layout over the tracks right where I wanted it. I then pressed down hard to imprint the track on the bottom of the mountain. Using compass, I scribed the width of about 3/4" from the rail imprint to allow rolling stock to fit through it.
I opted to do the mud part first. If I were to do this again I would cut the tunnels first, then mud.

Once the basic form is done, you will need to fill in the holes left by the ridges in the foam.

With rubber gloves on, add the drywall mud to fill in the holes and form the shell of your mountain.

Here is a picture the holes and ridges being filled. You can see there are definitive lines that need to be filled.

Now that I have the holes and ridges covered, it was time to cut the tunnels.

Here, you can clearly see the impression of the track and scribes I made for the width of the tunnels.

I used a long straight knife to cut a path then used my Xacto gouging bit to start to cut away the tunnel itself.

Here is a side view of the start of the tunnel.

I found it easier to cut the tunnels by layers rather than all at once. Here the first layer is done.

Here I have 1 of the tunnels cut out.

A bottom view. Note I left the top rough to simulate what a real tunnel might look like.

With the first tunnel done, I checked out the fit. A little bit more to cut away and round off.

Here I have second tunnel roughed out.

The other side of the tunnel checked out using a taller car to check the height.

Now that the cutting and roughing is done it's time to put on the mud. You need to do this is thin layers as too much mud will crack as it dries.

A close up view of the car fitting in the tunnel. I still have a bit of foam to remove.

You can see here that the mud come in very handy in forming the contours of your mountain. When dry you can either add more or sand it to get what you want.

Here is a side view with the first pass of mud complete. Depending on the temperature and amount of mud you use, it takes about 30 minutes to 1 hour for the mud to dry correctly.

Another view. You can see the mountain taking shape. I chose to have a water fall and a couple of ravines to add detail.

One of the areas I needed to mud heavy was in the narrow area by the tunnels.

You can see the difference. Makes for a better looking opening.

With the mud portion complete, it's time to paint. It is very important that you use a latex based house paint before using any spray paint. Spray paint will just ball up and the will show through. Use a neutral flat paint so if any shows through it blend in.

You also need to mud the inside of the tunnels. This will make painting the tunnels easier.

I started painting by using a black spray paint to coat the inside of the tunnels. This gives them a look of depth.

Here the all mudded up and with it's base coat of latex paint. This entire mountain weighs less than a pound.

I started to use spray paint to get the look I wanted. The nice thing about nature is you can almost do no wrong.

Here I added some red paint. After I toned it down with brown paint and scenery, it looked pretty good.

Right after I spray painted, I started to add my scenery items. Small rocks, grass & dirt. The wet paint held it to the mountain.

I used wet paint to try to get a more natural look of what dirt might look like. It worked OK. I used 'dull coat' afterwards to get rid of the paint shine. Something I tried in part 3 of this series seemed to work much better. Spread your scenery out then spray it with scenic cement. I used Woodland Scenics S191 premixed. I have not tried it on the mountain but in the river I'm doing for part 3, it worked very well.

A different view.

A third view. You can see the highlights the red paint caused.

Here is how it ended up.

Another view. Again the red seemed to really enhance the look.

Here is the mountain on the layout.

Now we just need to scenic the rest of the module.

Since this goes on a portable layout, I used 1/4" dowel pins to hold the mountain in place. This will keep the mountain in place when the trains are running and allow for quick removal for train wrecks and track cleaning.
By no means is this project totally complete. I still have lots to do. I will be updating this as I add more scenery. I have a couple more projects to show you that will enhance the mountain.
Part 3 of this series will be making a river using the blue foam as your base material for your layout.