Wild Tuft – Dry

Dry grass as a date on a diorama

The color of the vegetation gives away the season faster than any other detail. Straw-dry tufts place a scene in late summer or at the end of the dry season: southern Italy in August, a steppe before the harvest, the Castilian plateau, an abandoned airfield overgrown with weeds. The same tone also suits the edges of dirt tracks, where the stalks are baked together with dust and exhaust fumes.

The workmanship

The package contains seventeen separate tufts twelve millimeters tall, which is the largest format the manufacturer offers in this range. The fibers are stuck to a clear self-adhesive film; a tuft is lifted off it with the tip of a pair of tweezers and pressed onto the base. The bottom holds by itself, but under a thin layer of PVA glue (white glue) the joint is firmer and the fibers do not spread.

How to work with them

Twelve millimeters matches grown vegetation in 1:35 scale and a wild grassy field in larger scales. Do not plant them in a regular grid; nature picks the foot of a wall, the ground around stones and the places a wheel or a track cannot reach. The fibers can be shortened with sharp scissors or thinned with tweezers, so that two neighboring tufts do not look like castings from one mold. A final touch of pigment in the shade of the surrounding soil then ties the tuft to the ground it grows from and removes the impression of a glued-on accessory.

Filling out the scene

Dry vegetation sits well beside finer materials. Low static grass laid around the foot of a tuft hides the transition to the terrain, and a few dry twigs give the scene the direction in which the wind blows.