Joe Fugate's HO Siskiyou Line Model Railroad

Here's some of the "August in southern Oregon" tall summer grass I have modeled. I am a firm believer that ground foam is not enough to model many kinds of scenery textures accurately.

And tall grass is one of those all-important and common textures you find in nature. Here's a detailed description of how I model tall grass so that it looks right, and it's easy to do.

I use a scenery product called silflor (you can get it from Scenic Express, call their 1-800 line and get a sampler pack) combined with fake fur (get from a local fabric store).

You can get fake fur for a few dollars a yard, but silflor costs about $20 per square foot. So to economize, I use silflor on the edges of a large grass expanse and then fill in the middle with fake fur. I color the fake fur by brushing in acrylic paint to match the silflor's color.

In the pictures that follow I show you close up what the silflor and fake fur looks like and how you can make use of each to best advantage in your modeling of tall grass.

Silflor comes in a mat with a plastic fiber backing (the green material shown in this photograph). You can easily tear silflor into clumps, which works great for modeling clumps of tall grass here and there.

But as I mentioned, the stuff's pretty expensive for large grass expanses, and that's why I mix it with fake fur since the fur is much more economical than silflor.

Silflor produces some of the most natural looking model railroad tall grass of any product I have ever found. You can trim off the green backing along the edges of the silflor and get an extremely natural looking tall grass edge.

Fake fur, on the other hand, has problems on the edges looking natural, and that's where the silflor comes to the rescue!

Here's an ultra-closeup of the silflor and you can see that even in very close, it still looks impressive and natural for representing tall grass.

I've tried modeling tall grass using clumps of twine, hemp, brush bristles or sisal rope. None of them come close to looking as good as silflor. With almost no work, silflor just always looks great for any size grass expanse, be it a small clump or a field.

Of course, modeling a field with silflor can break the bank, so that's where the fake fur comes to the rescue, since it costs far less!

The best fake fur to get is a neutral buff or tan color as shown here. Get a nap length that matches the silflor you are using.

The neutral color makes it easy to color the fur later any color you need from a yellow to a full fledged lush green.

I sprayed a bit of cheap yellow and tan spray paint lightly on part of this fake fur and you can see that spot behind my fingers. This can get the fake fur closer to the color of the silflor, but it's best to also brush in some acrylic paint later after you glue the fake fur and silflor down to get the final color match to blend nicely.

Here's what the fake fur looks like close up, and it starts to look just like what it is, fake polyfiber fur. That's why I don't just use fake fur for the entire expanse of grass.

The look of the fur breaks down when you get up close, which is why the silflor edges work so well -- they disguise the "fuzzy fiber" look most effectively. The fuzzy fiber look is the most obvious on the edges of the fake fur.

You can see here how the edges of the fake fur looks next to the silflor. As long as the nap length is similar, once you brush in some acrylic paint into the fake fure to match the color of the silflor, it becomes tough to see the edges, which is just what we want.

You can also brush a little of the color into the silflor too, which will help make the edge between the two materials disappear.

If you get in real close, and you know what you are looking for, you can see the border between the silflor and fake fur. But check out the finished scene below.

This is the same scene as the one shown above with the lines in it showing the joint between the silflor and the fake fur.

Can you see the joint between the silflor and the fur? If you click on the image here you can get a larger image that you can study. If you look carefully at the larger image, you can see the joint, but you have to know what you are looking for.

As it is the eye just assumes the middle of the grass expanse is the same as the edges!

And when you add in the trains, the final scene looks pretty convincing for an HO scale model. Much better than just using ground foam.

I can just hear the summer cicadas buzzing in the warm August sun as the train ambles around the bend south of Roseburg, Oregon.

Page last updated on December 31, 2004
E-mail:  siskiyou@railfan.net