Easy small hill

[Biased turkey]

This is the 1st and only hill I build so far.

1) I use paper wads ( made into a pillow shape ) stacked to build the terrain contours.
When satisfied with the shape, use masking tape to hold the paper wads in place.

I build cardboard templates of the rocks and hot glued them on the paper wads.
That avoids having to fill big gaps when adding the molded rocks



2) Cut some about 4" by 8" sections of plaster cloth, dip each one for 10 seconds in water and start to cover the paper wads.
The plaster cloth sections must overlap.
Let dry for 24 hours



3) Spay the flat face of the prepainted rocks and the plaster cloth terrain where the rocks will be attached with water , apply some lightweight hydrocal on the back of the rock and press into place.



4) ( No pictures for those steps )
- Using your fingers, apply a thin coat of Sculptamold on top of the plaster cloth to smooth and reinforce the contour.
-When dry, apply some tan latex paint on the Sculptamold and let the paint dry

5) Working by section, apply a white glue ( 8 parts ) and water ( 2 parts ) mixture on top of the painted Sculptamold and sprinkle the low ground cover ( blended turf, dirt etc.. )
-When dry, spray with Scenic Cement ( or 1 part white glue and 5 parts water ) to fix the low ground cover and sprinkle some coarse turf.
-When dry, using some pure white glue add talus and clump foliage.



Jacques

[Trucklover]

Those hills and rocks really look COOL!! Great Job on the scene so far

[Herc Driver]

Great way of doing that with great results!

[Jesso]

I always liked the way that hill turned out. Thanks for sharing how you did it. It turned out very nice!

[LynnB]

I've done it this way quite a few times now , just crumple up some paper , staple down the edges , tape over the top and plaster of paris. Your came out real nice.

[Biased turkey]

Thank you Josh, Herc Driver, Scott and Lynn for taking some of your valuable time to reply.
I improved the hill alittle by adding some Woodland Scenics dirt where the tan latex paint was too apparent.

A more appropriate tittle for the thread should have been " An almost easy small hill" because I didn't like the way the original hill came out
and decided to tear it apart and start all over again.
I'm glad I did it.
That's one of the beauties of model railroading: You don't like the result, just tear it down and start all over again.
Using paper wads is very inexpensive, but takes some time.
I'm glad my nice wife helped me to make those paper wads and gave me her opinion about how I should stack them.

Jacques

[Spitfire]

Very nice Jacques. I think this is a great way to get more rugged terrain. I've been using insulating foam for hills, and that gets expensive in a hurry. Plus it's a neat way to recycle at least some newpaper!

cheers
Val

[Biased turkey]

Thanks Val for taking some of your valuable time to reply.
I think paperwads is a great way to go for building small hills with gentle slopes but if I had to build a bigger layout ( 4' X 8' for example ) with rugged mountains I would for sure go the pink insulating styrene way.
As you can see on the pictures, I used that pink styrene as a sub-roadbed and I could have used some leftover for the hill but I opted for the paperwads.

Jacques