Being new here, I really should start at the beginning.
I am a professional model railroader. For seven years I have been building a museum depicting the Union Pacific Railroad between Cheyenne, Wyoming and Ogden, Utah. Our time frame is the beginning of September of 1957.
I try to be as accurate as I can with my work. One of my lifelong pet peeves has been the unrealistic re-creation of what is arguably the most numerous plant species in the western U.S. If one builds a model railroad anywhere west of Nebraska, there needs to be sagebrush on it. Yet, no one seems to have nailed it to my eyes. How hard can it be?
Well, it turns out to be one of the harder challenges I’ve faced so far. I go to great lengths to get the ‘feel’ right. That includes road trips to Utah and Wyoming to collect dirt and plant samples along with weeks of research at any museum, historical society or college I can find.
But sagebrush shouldn’t be a problem. After all, I’ve spent my whole life walking by the plants on hikes or going fishing. I certainly know what it looks like in my minds eye.
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I’ve learned how to make my own ground foam for vegetation. This involves soaking poly-foam in a latex paint mixture, letting it dry and then pulverizing it to a size I can use. and that’s where I started. Only the initial result was not what was in my mind’s eye nor nowhere close to reference photos that I have taken at that time of year in Wyoming. Ok, I can deal with that. It’s just going to take some more brain cells devoted to the issue.
So, why does sagebrush have that distinctive look? Well, to start with it belongs to the Asteraceae family, which covers everything from Artichokes to Zinnias. The family currently has 32,913 accepted species names. There’s a lot of variety there. Great Basin Sagebrush has fuzzy silvery blueish green leaves. Light plays havoc with the stuff, especially in photography. How many colors are in this one plant?
Try as I could, I wasn’t able to pull off that silvery shine to it. I could come close to the greens and blues, but nothing that would make the grade(pardon the train pun). So I took some photos down to the local paint store to see what they could do and it was worse than my attempts! Ok, more brain cells are needed.
The over arching color to any of my photos had to be silver. So I started with that. Back at the paint store, the only thing they had that would be a good base color of real looking silver was $70 a gallon. Oi, this better be worth it.
In talking with artist friends, I knew that to do it right I had to have multiple colors of ground foam on each plant to pull off the complexity. Here’s my first try.
I know it looks a lot like a blue, but again the light really plays with this stuff. But I wasn’t happy either. I kept try to reconcile what I was doing with what I remember. But the colors were never the same. Ok, even more brain cells are needed.
I thought back to all of my memories and it occured to me that most of my time spent with the plant was in the early summer when I would go to my grandparents place in Idaho for a month or two. Well, June in Idaho means that plants are really just getting going. Wasn’t I always happy about the cooler temperatures and good fishing that time of year?
So what’s different about the plant in the time of year that I’m modeling? The one thing that I kept skipping over every time I looked at the photo. What’s that yellow stuff on the ends? Flowers. I had never seen the plant bloom before. Ugh. I had to wait six months for my next research trip up there and by goodness, I was going to take better photos!
But there was still the matter of form. It wasn’t good enough to settle for a little cluster of foam to represent what is a shrub that can grow 6 feet tall. Sagebrush also spreads by feeder roots, leading to complex trunk structures. There was no way I was going to simulate each trunk in each bush. I have to make thousands of these things!
Enter my static grass machine. This little device strips negative electrons off of Rayon fibers. When these fibers are passed through the machine and land on a grounded surface, they stand straight up. Take a look at my grass clusters.
So, with the creative use of my machine and a cookie sheet, I can make fields of sagebrush at a time. Now, I’m off and running. With additional development of techniques, I can finally be happy with my endeavors.
Life can certainly take you places you never thought you would end up. The freaking Wall Street Journal interviewed me about model railroading. It was kinda cool to have the article come out on my birthday no less. I bet I;m the first long haired hippy from Cornville, Arizona to make that birdcage liner.
Anywho, take a look at the results and feel free to critique it. As you can tell, I like to get better at whatever I’m doing.
What’s up in nature in your area today?
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