Scenery Base with Colored Sculptamold

Dunes Junction off the brackets and on to the sawhorses. Masking tape protects the weathered and detailed track

This book, by the way,
is a treasure trove of
scenery building information. 

The next stage of Dunes Junction scenery construction: a colored terrain base.  I applied colored Sculptamold over the styrofoam terrain forms after masking off the track and bridge abutments and pier.

I used the Sculptamold coloration technique described in Dave Frary's How to Build Realistic Model Railroad Scenery (3rd Edition).

I mixed one part Benjamin Moore Sedona Brown matte latex paint to three parts water, and then used that to mix with an equal amount of dry Sculptamold, which is a surprisingly fluffy material.

I applied the colored Sculptamold with a rubber spatula--the work went really fast.  It 'set' in a couple of hours and was completely dry within two or three days.  Raw Sculptamold reportedly sets much more quickly and completely dries within a day or so.

A view from the northeast. The variations in color correspond
to the dryness of the Sculptamold.

The latex paint will make future appearances in scenery construction. Frary's technique--repeated often in various Kalmbach scenery how-to books and articles--makes use of earth-colored flat latex as an adhesive and coloration.  One of the features of good scenery is continuity of color and use of a limited palette of colors, and using the same base color across a variety of steps helps to ensure this continuity.