Wild Tuft – Light Green

Light green means spring

The shade of growth is not just decoration but a date. A deep dark green belongs to high summer and to damp places, whereas a lighter tone tending toward yellow is read by the eye as grass freshly sprouted in spring, or as a dry surface where the sun has burnt the color out. If a setting shows a field path in April, this lighter shade is exactly right, and on a waterlogged meadow it looks false.

Where young growth belongs

Low tufts suit places where the soil has recently been disturbed: the edge of a worn rut, the joints between paving stones, the bank of a freshly filled trench or the shade under a vehicle. It pays to combine them with darker growth in a ratio of about one to three, because a uniform area of a single tone gives away its artificial origin at first glance. The package holds thirty-five of them, which will do for an ordinary display base with a margin for mistakes.

They come after varnishing

Plant material must not go on before all the chemical finishing of the surface. Spraying a protective coat over finished tufts presses the fibers together and the scene looks at once as though it had been through rain and snow. Deal with matching the color to the terrain using dry dust shades carried on a brush, or by rubbing a pinch of soil into the growth from the same material you used to scatter the path. Before gluing, ruffle a tuft lightly with your fingers, so that the fibers do not all stand in one direction. Keep the remaining pieces from the package along with the packaging, because the shade differs between production batches and a piece bought later need not match a scene already under way.