De-clodifiying Stolen Dirt and More Scenery Progress

Dirt from a baseball diamond, a day or so after its theft
from a local park. Visible are my de-clodifying roller
(a dried-up old bottle of Plastruct Bondene cement) and
manual drying and aeration agitation device (dollar store
rubber spatula, useful for countless scenery chores) 

Scenery building took a short hiatus for the Thanksgiving holiday, but we're getting back on track.

Readers of this blog know I like to mock stuff up and conceptualize. I especially like to do this when my layout looks more like the surface of Tatooine or Arrakis than the Calumet Region of Indiana summertime I am aiming for.

So I painted in Mineral Springs Road and the Dunes Junction parking lot with some cheap acrylic craft paint.  Still looks like a Bantha or a Sandworm might come cruising by, but now with a road and a parking lot.

But seriously, the paint has helped me validate the placement of these key features.

Meanwhile, turns out the one scenery building material I didn't have lying around was dirt. Dave Frary says in his book, and Pelle Soeborg says in his book, to use real dirt as a textural foundation. Dave even suggests that baseball diamond dirt works best.

The painted road and parking lot of Dunes Juction, plus a mocked-up
flagstop shelter for good measure.

So I stole about a half a coffee can's worth of baseball diamond dirt from a local park. It's been drying on top of some newspapers for a day or so.  I used an old round glue bottle to roll out the big clods ('de-clodification' shall be my contribution to the body of scenery building knowledge) and rubber spatula to spread the dirt into an even layer and 'turn' it a couple of times a day to encourage it to dry.  Some folks put there treasured dirt into the oven to dry it out and kill any critters that are in there.  I'll have to figure out a stealthy way to do that when I'm (ahem) alone in the house.