Earth Blend

An earth blend under everything else

The base layer of terrain decides how a scene looks, even though grass and growth cover most of it in the end. This material is a blend of earth tones that goes down first and hides the color of the base, the seams in plaster and the marks left by sanding.

The package has a volume of 886 cm³, which is an order of magnitude more than ordinary bags of turf. For a large module or for the whole bottom layer of a diorama it is therefore enough without buying more, and the shade stays the same across the whole area because it comes from a single batch.

Why a blended shade

Real soil is not one color. The blend holds several earth tones at once, so even a continuous area has the small irregularity that a single color turf would leave the modeler to add laboriously. In a photograph that shows at once, because the surface stops looking like a painted board.

It is applied to an area brushed with thinned white glue; once it has set, the excess is poured off and vacuumed or swept away. On exposed spots such as vehicle ruts and paths the layer can be repeated.

Contents and use

Inside there is the loose material on its own. It suits use under grass, under bushes, and as a surface in its own right for a yard, a field track or a building site. Scale is not limited; the fineness of the grain is governed more by viewing distance than by the size of the model.

A large package has one more practical advantage. When a scene is extended by another module after some time, what is left from the same batch matches the older part in color and the join does not show. With material blended later, the difference usually shows precisely at the border between two boards.