Desert Sand Mats

A sandy plain without a single blade

Sand takes up enormous areas on a diorama, and for that very reason it tends to be the hardest: it has to be even but not dull. A mat in the shade of desert sand measuring 83.8 x 127 cm gives such an area a base in a moment and saves the spreading as well as the slow leveling of layers, which moreover slide during handling.

It is used for North African and Middle Eastern views, for desert airfields, for the parched plains of western scenes and for a large construction site. The vinyl base does not warp, the flock does not come off and the shade does not fade, so an area stands up even to many trips to exhibitions and back.

From a flat desert to a living scene

• ruts are suggested by scraping the flock into shallow bands
• stones and rubble are glued where the wind would have bared them
• the edges of areas are darkened with pigment, so that a scene is not uniform
• isolated dry clumps emphasize the scale and the extent of a landscape

The sandy tone is rewarding as a base for a beach or for the bed of a dried-up river too. It gets on with coarser rubble as well as with a compound for a water surface, which only has to be poured into a shallow hollow cut into the board.

A desert view stands up to far more contrast than it seems at first glance. The tracks of crawlers, sand drifted by obstacles and lighter ridges of dunes turn a uniform area into a landscape with depth. The mat can be glued down fast, or it stays laid loose if it serves as a changing background for photographing models. For joining it to the terrain around it helps to spread a little loose sand of the same tone along the edge.