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Lily pads, cattails, and pond scum |
Techniques for modeling freshwater pond details
by Gerry Leone
Even if you're not modeling my home state, the Land of 10,000 Lakes, your layout may have a lowlands area that could use a small lake pond, or bog. These shallow, quiet bodies of fresh water usually contain cattails, lily pads, and pond scum. Here are a few simple techniques for modeling those details.
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Two shakes of a cat's tail
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The prototype - full-grown cattails in summertime.
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To model the basic cattail stalk, cut a small tab in a piece of paper to paint nail polish on Plastruct rod. A book holds the tab in place as you work.
| | Cattails are common perennial herbs that grow anywhere from five to nine feet high. Modeling cattails takes several steps, but the process lends itself to making dozens at a time.
In HO, use Plastruct .010" plastic rod cut into approximately 1" lengths for the main stalks. To color the rods, hold them with tweezers and dunk each into a bottle of Polly Scale 404076 Coach Green - a color that blends in nicely with Woodland Scenics ground foam colors. Let the stalks dry thoroughly.
Cut a small tab, about six scale inches across, out of a piece of heavy paper. This will be your paintbrush for creating the cattail's velvety brown seed pod. Using the pages of a book to hold the tab above your workbench, put a sizable drop of brown nail polish on the end of the tab.
Wait a minute or so for the nail polish to thicken. Hold the Plastruct rod parallel with the paper painting tab and drag about six scale inches of the tip through the polish, creating a blob. As you drag, roll the rod between your fingers to distribute the polish evenly. Poke the rod into a small scrap of rigid foam to dry.
Be careful not to use too much nail polish - not only will the cattail be oversized, but the enamel in the nail polish will weaken the plastic. For fat cattails, it's better to use two thinner coats and let the polish dry in between.
If your blob is too bulbous or poorly shaped, let it dry for a minute or two and reshape it by gently rolling it on the surface of your workbench or between your fingers.
Once the polish hardens, dip the top of the cattail into Polly Scale 414275 Roof Brown.
The final step is to paint the top 6" spike of the cattail, again by tweezer-dunking. The color on this end varies: in mid-summer it's a vibrant rust orange (Polly Scale 414323 Rust), but as fall nears the color changes to beige (Polly Scale 414317 Concrete).
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Green and gold grasses
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I use Enviro-Tex Lite two-part epoxy to model water. It's easy to work with and its surface dries completely level - perfect for small, still bodies of water such as woodland ponds.
Your shoreline and shallow water should contain an abundance of the tall grasses cattails grow in. I mix Woodland Scenics medium green, dark green, and gold tall grasses to achieve the effects of new, mature, and dead vegetation respectively. Use white glue to cement pencil-diameter-sized bundles to the shore as well as out several scale feet onto the water surface. It's best to space the initial plantings widely apart; once the glue dries, I can plant more, getting the vegetation as dense and even as possible.
It's easiest to plant most of the grasses before pouring the resin. Once the Enviro-Tex has set, go back and use white glue to attach a small amount of additional grass in front of that already planted. This hides the areas where the Enviro-Tex has crept up the stems of the grass bunches.
Cut your cattails slightly shorter than the tallest grass, and use a droplet of cyanoacrylate adhesive (CA) or white glue to plant them among the grasses.
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Lily pads with a punch
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Water lily plants grow in great multicolored clusters in larger bodies of freshwater.
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Gerry used a sharpened piece of brass tubing to punch out lily pads by the dozen.
| | Lily pads - the leaves of water lily plants - flourish along the shallow shorelines and quiet inlets of larger bodies of fresh water. The 6"- to 15"-broad leaves are medium-green when young, dark green when mature, yellow while dying, and brown once dead. Many leaves contain several colors. Lily pads usually grow in great abundance, with the leaves often overlapping one another as the plants fight for sunlight.
The easiest way to model lily pads is to punch them out - literally - by the dozen. First, put several drops of Polly Scale 414122 Reefer Yellow, Coach Green, and Roof Brown on a piece of white paper. Use a paintbrush to mix, overpaint, and push the colors around the paper at random. Then let the paint dry completely.
To make the lily pad punches, chose several short lengths of brass tubing with inner diameters ranging from 1/16" to 1/8". Use an awl or nail set to flare the end of each tube slightly and chuck it into a variable-speed electric drill. Run the drill at slow speed while holding a round needle file in the open end of the tube. In a minute or two you'll have a sharp cutting edge.
Now the fun part. Put the painted paper on a soft surface such as a cutting mat, and punch out your lily pads. Depending on the thickness of your paper, you may need to tap the back end of the punch with a hammer. If you'd like to give the lily pads the characteristic "dinner plate" shape, punch six to ten at a time, and poke them out of the tube from the back with a piece of stiff wire or a toothpick. The slight flaring of the end of the tube will cause the lily pads to become slightly concave as they stack up inside.
Cut the characteristic stem slot in each of the lily pads with a sharp hobby knife, then glue them to the surface of your pond, making sure to randomly overlap their edges.
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Pond scum
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Algae and duckweed can completely cover the surface of a small body of water in late summer.
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In a model, the sheer amount shown in the photo above would be overkill.
| | In summer, the combination of heat, humidity, and sunlight is perfect for the development of scum on small bodies of water. This green scum actually comes from one of two biological sources: algae and duckweed. It's most prevalent on smaller ponds, although it does accumulate on the windward shores of larger bodies of water.
If your pond is already in place, sprinkle fine ground foam (Woodland Scenics Weeds or Grass works well) along the shoreline and use diluted white glue or matte medium to secure it to your Enviro-Tex water.
If you have yet to pour your pond, try this. After the Enviro-Tex has set for about 45 minutes, use a toothpick to dab small droplets of Floquil 110048 Coach Green directly onto the surface, right next to the shore. Over the next hour the paint will spread an inch or so, turning from solid green into a network of extremely fine green flecks. The result is a convincing scum that's part of the surface and can't be damaged.
When choosing your scum color, be sure to compensate for any tinting you added to your Enviro-Tex, as this will affect the final color. If you space your initial paint dabs far enough apart, surface tension and drying will keep them from mixing together. This will form convincing "critter trails" to the shore.
Dressing up a small lake, pond, or bog can be an interesting modeling diversion. Some would even call it a quiet refuge (pun intended) from the daily demands of a layout!
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| A special thanks to Dr. Dick Osgood, good friend and limnologist, for some of the technical details in this article. | |
The above articles is the property of and is
the copyright of Kalmbach
Publishing Co. |
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