Scenery

Rocks

There are a lot of rocks to be made – about 22’ of them in length and up to 3’ high in places!

The challenge was how to make them light enough so that we could lift the baseboards!

We looked at several possibilities – all of which turned out to be too heavy or which did not work such as:

Plaster casts using either home made latex moulds from coal or bought in rubber moulds.

Tearing foam chunks and painting them with runny plaster.

The final solution was as follows:

1. Form the basic shape of the mountainside using either chicken wire or polystyrene blocks.

2. Cover with a layer of plaster bandage.

3. Break bits of low-density polystyrene into rock shapes and stick on to the mountainside.

4. Cover with a layer of plaster bandage.

5. Knife on lightweight plaster which we pre-coloured (we used Sculptamold from EDM) to add edges and detail.

6. Paint with dilute acrylic paint in a series of thin washes – or at least that’s what we should have done! We got the paint too thick and too dark and had too many different ‘pallets’ across the layout. Getting back to a lighter and uniform appearance was a major task!

Below is a section in bare plaster finish:

Below is a shot of a section of rock in base coat.

Here is the same section in almost finished state.