The stream that bisects the pasture gets sluggish and swampy before it passes under the tracks and continues down the ditch to tumble (somehow!) into the Muskrat River. The swamp will consist primarily of cattails or bulrushes – they’re too similar to tell the difference in HO scale. I’d already planted a number of them when I was working on the pasture, and shortly before going on a couple of weeks’ trip, I lasered 200 more plants.
The last year’s batch were coloured with Prismacolor “Dark Green” art marker, and when they landed on the layout they turned out too blue. So I fed some yellow paint onto them to green them up. Sadly, I didn’t keep track of the yellow, and when it came to the next 200 plants, I used some “Yellow Orange” which made them too dark. “Canary Yellow” was just right, although it could probably benefit from a lighter starting colour.
The seed heads are flat as they come off the laser, of course. To colour them and also thicken them up, I used acrylic paint. I first tried applying the paint with a brush, but the plants want to stick to the brush. I found a 1mL medical syringe enabled me to deposit a good thick bead of paint without touching the plant. Folk Art “Real Maroon Brown” is a nice colour, and the bottle squirts the paint directly into the syringe.
Pembroke:87 