Rocking rocks

Well the queen of Utrainia is away for the weekend, which means it's back to bachelor living for me and the cat, and the bulk of the weekend has been spent in the garage, bag of plaster in one hand, empty pizza boxes in the other!

During the week I went on a collection trip up the road to get some suitable soil. I tried to turn this soil into a clay-coloured paste to cover the raw polystyrene, but instead I just made mud. Mistake #1!

Correcting this mistake, I made a new paste consisting of: "Deck and Pave Grip" (very very fine sand), acrylic modeling paste, water. Mixing these together made a nice gritty paste that I used to cover the polystyrene and blend the rocks into the scene. This worked well.

I then glued the first tunnel into position and filled behind it with boulders. The boulders were easily made: take one zip lock bag, some old plaster castings and a hammer. Put plaster in bag, seal, bash. When done you should have a good variety of plaster rocks.

The scree slope is clearly visible, but needs a bit more work yet to make it obviously a scree slope.

While this was going on I had the genius idea to cover the polystyrene in plaster bandages. This gives a nice smooth, firm surface ready for finishing. What I discovered while cutting dozens of bits of plaster cloth to go around all the rocks is that it would be much easier to do this before there were rocks everywhere. Mistake #2! In future, cover polystyrene, then add rocks.

I also decided there weren't enough rocks, so I added more around the middle of the scene. Then I added more to the right of the scene, more around the tunnel, extended other rocks, filled in holes, etc. For several hours I would mix up some plaster, scoop it onto the scene, roughly shape it, run off and clean the mixing cup of plaster, rush back and by now the plaster would just about be ready to carve. Then for the next 15 minutes I'd carve it. Rinse and repeat for half a bag of plaster.

After recuperating my rock-carving muscles overnight I was back into it this morning. I set about adding rocks to the foreground of the scene, this time on top of the plaster; much simpler.

So again I did my plaster-magic for severa hours. When I'd utterly had it with plaster, I switched to the gritty-paste and set about blending the rocks into the scenery and hiding some of the plaster cloth.

That was far more enjoyable, and so then I decided to start adding rubble and scree to the scene. Luckily I had a vast collection of containers of plaster-gravel, graded by size and smoothness (I'll detail my electric-scree-maker in another post).

I started with a layer of glue, then added some "key" stones, large boulders that have rolled down the slope. Then I added course gravel, then medium scree. A quick tap with a dry paintbrush lodged the fine screen amongst the larger rocks and it was ready for a spay with IPA (basically high-powered, super-potent wet-water). The IPA moistens everything but without any surface tension, so things get wet without moving. Then I drizzled on copious amounts of dilute PVA glue.

Much better! I I soon had done the whole foreground scene. Once it's dry I'll brush over some fine gravel, the theory being that it'll work its way down between the course stuff, rather than just sitting on top like some kind of weird gravel-snow.

I was pretty pleased with this. Looking at my reference photos though I saw that there was far too many scree slopes, and far too little rock. Ulgh. I dragged out another 2kg bag of plaster and set to work. This time I threw caution to the wind and made up a huge batch of plaster and globbed it onto the scene.

Rushed off, cleaned my mixing jar and tools, came back and did a quick vacuum and then set to work. Soon plaster chunks were flying all over the place (I found some in the kitten's fur several hours later!?). More plaster was mixed and more rocks were added.

Ahh now we're cooking! Look at that huge pillar of rock that the brave Utrainian engineers have had to tunnel through!

Rock Shelter

In the middle of the scene I am going to build a rockfall shelter. This will nicely compose the scene I think. So I set about making some molds for that. On the iPad I sketched up a rough plan (iPad since pencil & paper meant moving, and moving meant convincing the kitten) and then I built up a mold from styrene and hot glue. Before casting it I added some mold release (margarine) and then syringed in my patent-pending Hydrocal+PVA hybrid high strength plaster mix and vibrated all the air bubbles out. That'll set overnight, then I'll turn the plaster masters into silicone molds before casting a bunch of them in urethane resin. That way I get the texture of concrete (from the plaster) but the strength, workability and flexibility of resin.

Exhausted I decided to call it a night. Another thousand rocks to carve tomorrow; you can see above on the left hand end what I hope the whole scene will look like. Yikes!

Looks like it's going to be worth it though, the scene is really starting to come together.

Over and out,
Chief Engineer of Utrainia.