Smoothing the hills by Will Vale, on Flickr
The next step after the foam carving and sticking is filling in all the rubbish bits. I tend to stuff the cracks with offcuts to save on filler, and then spread a coat of "lightweight spackle" over the landforms. I think this is made with tiny glass bubbles in an acrylic carrier. It's really really light, flexible, and clean to use - if you drop some on finished scenery it won't stick - you have to spread it onto surfaces before it grips. And this feature also works on carpet The tub warns not to use it on plastic, but I haven't had problems with it eating the foam.
It looks a bit ghastly to start with:
but if you wait for an hour or two for it to start to skin over you can stipple it with an old brush to knock down the ridges left by the knife. This also gives a bit of basic texture and helps bed the filler in around rocks and such. It needs a gentle touch if the filler's been applied thickly, since it won't be solid under the surface.
With that out of the way I thought I'd have a go at carving the rocks above the Falkenstein tunnel. It's starting to look OK although I think it should really be set back a little more than it is from the tunnel mouth. I'm not sure I think that so strongly that I'm going to slice it all off and start again though
The toothpicks are holding some added-on bits of foam in place to fill in some gaps in the rock face. I'm not sure if I'm going to end up adding more surface detail here (apart from a bit of sand in gesso as a sealing coat) although I'm wondering if filler and crumpled tinfoil would break up some of the larger facets without changing the shape too much?
(Sorry the pics are a bit crunchy - it's difficult to photograph white surface detail, I ended up boosting the local contrast to make up for my lack of lighting foresight...)
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