Heki wildgrass tutorial

[Steve]

This is a short tutorial on how I use and apply Heki's wildgrass.

I should begin by saying that I was made aware of this product by fellow modeler and good friend, Kurt (cnw1961), who uses it on his layout. He also gave me a heads up on what he found worked for him. Having said that.... you will see that it's pretty straight forward.

First the product.......
I used grasses #1840, 1841 & 1861. All of these can be found on the link below, just scroll down the page:

http://www.eurorailhobbies.com/erh_list....&offset=50

Here is how they look side by side:


The sheets are 18" X 6-5/8".


On the backside is a thin rubbery membrane which makes gluing them easy as pie. I LIKE EASY!
Both #1840 & 41 have the same solid membrane. You will notice that #1861 has a less solid membrane, this makes it easy to use it for small tufts and to help hide some of the edges of the other grasses (not necessary the majority of the time):



Let's get to work!

I tore off three pieces of grass (one of each kind) to fill in a small spot on the front of my layout. I will take advantage of the straight side of the biggest piece to go along the front edge of the layout:



The small section up front is where we will be working:




It is a good idea to do a "dry fit" before gluing (at least in the very beginning) to see how to best arrange the grass to get the look you want. In this case we only have three pieces and we already know where one of them is going.
I used Tacky glue (plain old white glue would work just as well) to adhere the grass to the layout. As you can see I apply it liberally:




Pressed firmly in place:




Next piece.......it will be placed above the first one with some separation:




Looks good:




Last piece....actually it will be pulled apart to make smaller "tufts":






These tufts were scattered about to help blend both the new, and, the preexisting grass in the area. You can see the glue in this picture, but it will disappear as it dries like the other small tufts in this shot:




Let's take a look at the finished product:



As you can see, the hardest part of this process is deciding where to put the pieces, and that becomes pretty easy after working with it a while and experimenting. The grass blends together beautifully with dirt and bushes to makes for a realistic ground cover:



It will work for a variety of locales as well. Here it is on Kurt's Miami layout. As you can see, it looks perfectly at home there as well. It helps make a beautiful scene, even better!......WOW!!!! That is a beautiful scene!


This whole tutorial could be summed up in one phrase: "tear and glue!"

Now I have to call Heki and see if they will pay me for doing their PR work