Creating a landslide
trees since that has been covered over the years, but I will say it was a lot eas- ier and faster using the McKenzie Brothers machine. To simulate tree trunks that were
broken but still standing in the center or direct path of the slide I used old cedar shake shingles that came from a neighbor’s house when it was being re- roofed several years ago. The shakes were cut into square strips on a table saw, then slowly pounded through a se- ries of gradually smaller holes drilled in a flat piece of ¹/₈″ thick steel plate. I ended up with trunks that were about a half an inch in diameter. Pounding the shake strips through the holes left a ragged surface on them that looked exactly like tree bark once it was paint- ed and dry brushed with varying tones of acrylic craft paints. For mounting the trunks in the scenery, a three-penny nail was hot glued into a hole drilled into the bot- tom of each one. To create the broken end of the stumps I simply put a trunk into my bench vise and hit the wooden shaft sideways with a hammer, break- ing it off and leaving a natural, shat- tered end.
Silver King Mountain (top) has regularly-occurring avalanches and landslides, which proved to be the solution to a scenicking problem at this wall. The base scenery was in place for years be- fore the author finished the scene. Bottle brush trees (left), were
Probably the hardest part of this en- tire process was working my way up through the benchwork that supported the area. It was a lot easier when I con- structed the basic scenery. (I was younger then.) Besides bending myself into awkward positions, I also had to worry about spilling cans and plastic containers of scenic materials and liq-
56
the starting point once the ground and rocks were stained and the soil was in place. They do a lot of “hiding” where the sky and ground meet. The slide zone itself is marked by loose material and broken trees made from discarded cedar roofing shingles.
uids down onto the layout. There were also two sets of hidden tracks to work around under the scenery. Once I was in place, I started gluing pieces of sphagnum moss along the wall and scenery seam using Aleene’s Tacky Glue. It would have been easier if I had someone helping me with posi- tioning the moss, but I managed to get
the job done. Then I used a battery- powered rotary tool with the proper- sized drill bits to make holes in the plaster rock castings for the tree trunks. They were simply pressed into the holes. The holes were tight enough that the twisted wires had to be gently forced down into them. The wire trunks of short pines were snipped off,
OCTOBER 2012
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