Wild Tuft – Beige

Parched steppe and tall straw

Landscape where it does not rain through the summer will not stay bare. Tall grass faded toward the light stays in it, cracking underfoot and in harsh sun almost merging with the sand. It is precisely such a color this package carries and it suits everywhere a scene is meant to look hot: North Africa, the Middle East, a dusty steppe road.

The dimension of the fiber comes to twelve millimeters and there are seventeen pieces. This is the tallest step offered, so from one clump growth comes about that in the usual military scale reaches a man above the knee, and in railway scale a tall shrub outright.

Combinations that work

• Light straw against dark ground gives a scene contrast that comes out in a photograph.
• Fine gravel and crushed bark as dry twigs go splendidly with the beige.
• At the edge of a road leave a strip of bare dusty surface; the grass begins only beyond it.
• Press a couple of clumps down to the sides with tweezers, as though a wheel had passed over them.

Light shades easily look flat. Slight toning from above helps, either with thinned brown paint applied by spattering or with pigment passed over the tips. The lower part of a clump, by contrast, should be left darker, for in real grass there is always shade and a damper, dirtier tone down by the ground.

Do not forget the small thing that sells a scene. Tall dry grass bends and breaks where people walk or vehicles drive, it does not give way in a straight line. If you set a couple of pieces leaning and one or two flattened right down, the area gains a story and stops looking like a regularly planted garden.