Planting Your Buildings

Hinted at in previous articles and following on from my article about building the Kestrel GMKD39 Industrial unit, this article looks at how to ‘plant’ your buildings on your layouts and dioramas. Looking around the exhibition circuits, and in magazines throughout the years, there are a few niggles I notice with some models, things that break the illusion, and one of those tends to be gaps along the base of buildings.

These gaps generally occur for a couple of reasons. The main one being that either the base of the building or the ground upon which it is being sat is not level. Generally, this does not impede the scenic abilities of either, but does tend to be quite noticeable.

This is an easy thing to fix. There are a couple of options when it comes to eradicating this gap. The first requires a little more planning but is the most effective option. This is simply to cut out some of the baseboard during the planning stage.

To do this, simply draw round the base of your building, and then chisel out the area you have just marked out. From here the building can be submerged below ground height, and even if the base of the building is uneven, once set in place, it will never be noticed.

The downside of this way is that it requires you to have the ability to remove ground underneath the building. Sometimes this isn't feasible, so the best option is to build up. You could happily build a second layer round the building to emulate it being sunken in, or just simply build up and hide the gap using scenic elements.

The image above shows the building edge hidden by building up the landscape around it. This will hide part of the building, so make sure the amount you build it up by does not start obscuring doorways and entrance ways.

To disguise the balsa and to give a nice surface to work on, the area was then coated in a layer of Plaster of Paris which, when dry, was painted. This allowed the building to be sat in the ground, but there was now a small gap between the building and the surrounding area.

Looking at a lot of churchyards in the area, I noticed that they usually had a gutter around their base, filled with stones to act as a runoff for excess rainwater. This was the perfect thing to replicate to hide the gaps. Here N Scale Ballast was used, and it was applied in the same way you would ballast around your track; applying it dry then using Ballast Bond to set it in place.

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Once dry, the rest of the area is 'sceniced' in. When this is all complete, the church building appears to have been there for many lifetimes and has become part of the landscape rather than sitting on top of it.

The same technique can be used in any scale and can be achieved with a number of different products. The following buildings all have different products used to sit them into their new homes.

This Faller Workers Hut is situated in a wooded area. Faller Coarse Terrain Flock was used to disguise this building. This technique can be applied to any building in an overgrown area.

This time a Wild Grass has been applied around the building. This example shows the need to keep your doorways clear, and a N scale ballast is used here instead to form a path.

Paint doesn't initially seem any use for planting buildings, but Texture Paints can be used to build up dirt and grime in areas and can also be used to hide the bases of buildings as seen here.

Texture paints can also be used in N Scale too, this kit build, as seen in a previous article, can be blended into its environment with a grey texture paint.

It doesn't just have to be grass that gives natural disguise. For houses, plants in the garden can act as a realistic break and really bed the buildings in.

Hopefully that has gone some way in showing you that your buildings will look even more realistic once they are planted into the landscape. Of course, there are a myriad of other options and ways of disguising the gaps, just make sure the one you chose is believable in that area, and you’ll be well away!