How to Decorate a Base with Static Grass - Part One

I first learned about static grass last year while looking for tutorials on how to make plaster rocks for a diorama project. I thought it looked pretty cool, and a few months later I was able to get a static grass applicator and think it's the best tool I've tried so far for creating realistic grass for model horses.

 

Most of the static grass tutorials I've found have been on model train sites. I haven't been able to find any model horse sites that even mention it, so I though I would do a tutorial on it here and hopefully introduce more people to this cool material.

I'm breaking this tutorial into three parts so the posts aren't ridiculously long. In this first part, I'll show you how to get your base ready to apply the static grass.

The tools and materials you will need for this part of the tutorial are:

• Base
• Primer
• Acrylic paint
• Matte acrylic varnish/sealer
• Water-based white glue
• Grass flock (optional)
• An old/cheap paint brush you don't mind getting glue on
• Scrap paper or some other material to cover your work surface

The base I'll be working on in this tutorial is for the unicorn seen in several of my recent posts. It's a simple white resin base with a neodymium magnet. While I'm working on a resin base, the basic techniques are the same for decorating other types of bases.

 

First I primed the base to make sure everything stuck well. Make sure to use a primer compatible with whatever material your base is made from! For this base I used Tamiya gray surface primer, the same primer I use for most of my models.

 

After spraying the base with primer and letting it dry, I cleaned off the magnet with a cotton swab dipped in acetone. Magnets work best when they are in direct contact with one another, and while you could wait until the base is finished and clean the magnet once at the end, I think it's a lot easier to just try and keep the magnet clean as possible while I'm working.

Static grass doesn't completely cover surfaces, so it won't look good if you try to put it directly over primer. I covered my base with green acrylic paint, avoiding the magnet.  After the paint dried, it was sealed with Liquitex matte varnish to make sure it stayed put though the subsequent steps. 

 

Once the base is painted, it's time for some grass flock. This step is optional, but I think it adds a lot of nice depth. Depending on the look you're going for, you could also use sand, dirt, lichen, ground coffee, dried moss, or any number of other materials, either alone or in combination.

 

Whatever you use, make sure it's ready to go, then cover the base in glue. Here I'm using Aleene's Tacky Glue thinned with just a little bit of water.

After applying the glue, I covered the base liberally with my grass flock and gently pressed to make sure there was good contact with the glue. The flock I'm using here is Woodland Scenics 'green grass' colored fine turf. I'm working on a piece of scrap paper so it's easy to collect the excess flock once the glue has dried.

 

After the glue had plenty of time to dry, I shook off the excess flock. As you can see, there are some bare patches. These generally happen either because I missed a spot when painting on the glue, or because I took too long painting on the glue and some of it dried before I added the flock. The bare patches were fixed by dabbing a little more glue on the bare spots and sprinkling them with flock.

 

I'll end part one here. Next time, we'll get to the part of the static grass tutorial that actually involves static grass!