Earth texturing begins

After covering the hill forms in a thin layer of coloured plaster I began adding the scenery on the first two modules by painting an earth-coloured paint on the modules. The next step was to add layers of dirt. 

Getting a colour that I was happy with was challenging. On my holiday I harvested some dirt from the area we visited that was close to what I wanted on my layout. I put it through my blender for making scenery materials and then screened it for various grades. The finest was a nice dusty dirt powder. Of course, natural materials always go darker when glued down. So I experimented with adding plaster to the dirt until I found a result that I liked. 

In the area around my team track and stockyard, I wanted the rails to be buried in the dirt. I've always loved the look of the buried track, but have not often seen it modelled. I couldn't find any good articles about how to create this effect, so if you can point to any I'd be interested. 

I used some masking tape to cover the inside of the rails and the rail head. I wanted the painted rail side to be visible after and not just a plastery mess. Then I mixed up some more batches of my dirt and plaster and spread it under the tracks, then pressed the tracks down into the mixture. The plaster/dirt mix oozed up between the ties and I used a large flat pain scraper to add more of the mix from the top and smooth it all out. 

As the mixture dried I found it cracked revealing the presence of the ties underneath. As the mixture dried I sifted more of the dirt onto the area, brushing and pushing it into the cracks. Once the base looked about right, I sifted on a final layer of dirt mixture through an old stocking. 

The cracking was probably because the ratio of plaster to dirt is a bit low, but it held together well. But it wasn't working "zip texturing application" of the final dirt layer. Zip texturing is where the plaster, usually mixed with powder paints, sets up hard and is enough to hold the scenery in place. I had to mist on some scenery cement (I used Mod Podge and water in a 1:3 ratio) to set everything up nicely. 

Earth-coloured paint was applied to the ground surfaces (those are stray small rocks not paint drips!)

The dirt mixture, still damp, shows signs of cracking around the buried tracks. 

Dirt spread around the yard area, with tracks masked off so they can be ballasted later. Dark areas are where the dirt application is thicker and takes longer to dry. 

Another view of the buried tracks. The area in the foreground will be a street and is here awaiting texturing.