Wild Tuft – Swamp

Swamp green for waterlogged terrain

This shade is aimed at vegetation standing knee-deep in water: a murky green shot through with brown and ocher, the kind found in drainage ditches, at the edges of pools, in reed beds or in rice paddies. Growth like that makes wet terrain legible, because it tells the eye where firm ground ends and mud begins.

Four millimeters and what to do with them

The length of the fibers is 4 mm, that is a middling value. A tuft of this size suits figures and vehicles in larger scales and yet does not overgrow the edge of a ditch. It works well to plant them more densely along the water surface and sparsely toward the dry bank; the transition then looks natural and does not end in a sharp line.

Gluing them on and matching them to the water

The sheet carries 35 tufts. They are peeled off one at a time, ideally with curved tweezers, and pressed onto a dry surface free of grease. If you are going to pour the water surface with resin or with a modeling gel, plant the growth only once the last layer has cured, otherwise the fibers stick together and lose their volume. The bottom of a tuft takes light toning with a brown wash that imitates a deposit of silt, and a few stems are best bent toward the water with tweezers, as if the water had pressed them down. For deltas and monsoon scenes we recommend combining it with taller variants, because a real wetland has growth in several layers. One more note on color: wetland vegetation tends to be markedly darker at the roots than at the tips, because it is shaded by the surrounding growth and by water vapor. The difference can be suggested by an overspray of lighter green directed downward from a height of about twenty centimeters.