Wild Tuft – Dry

Burned grass for desert scenes

This variant is the most parched position in the whole color range, straw bleached by the sun, without a single trace of chlorophyll. The home of such growth is the Middle East, North Africa, southern Spain or an Afghan wadi, that is scenes where the rest of the terrain is sand and dust.

Six millimeter fibers

The height of the growth comes to 6 mm and the sheet holds 35 separate clumps. In a desert setting it pays to be sparing; grass does not grow there in continuous areas but in isolated tufts in the shade of stones, by walls and at the edges of dried up beds, where the last moisture holds.

Matching a sandy base

So that the growth does not look glued on, it is worth tying it to its surroundings with pigment. A light application of pale dust on the bottom of the fibers and on the soil around evens both surfaces into one tone and removes the sharp boundary. Several clumps can be combed out to the sides with tweezers, as though the wind had blown them apart, while others are pressed down to the ground. With models of modern equipment it proves useful to catch a few stalks in the running gear and under the fenders, because dry grass really does catch everywhere. Anyone building a display scene will appreciate that the tufts are usable straight from the sheet and call for no additional painting. In larger scales one clump can be divided into two or three smaller ones. One more thing about placement. A real desert is not uniform; vegetation follows the places where water ran off after rain, that is the edges of beds, the hollows behind boulders and the foot of slopes. If you set the growth out along such a line, the terrain gains logic and stops looking like randomly scattered clumps.