Building Seven Pines Part 2

It has been a busy few weeks and I am going to catch up with a few posts. First off I am going to finish my con game board for the ACW Battle of Seven Pines. First off I want to thanks TMP's own xintao and tomrommel1 for their help and for patiently and promptly answering my questions. So here are a few shots of the mostly finished board.

Here we are all flocked. I used a combination of fine and course Woodland Scenics flock in the wooded areas. I tried doing only the course but it was difficult to attain the desired coverage. I got a much better result with the combination

I used a fine brown ballast for the roads, that worked out very well. I don't have the middle stream done yet but the smaller ones have been completed. I used this product;

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0018N7M9U/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o03_s04?ie=UTF8&psc=1

It was recommended by xintao and I found that it was an easy pour and forget product. As you can see by the pictures I had painted the streams a brown color. Then I dry brushed a black green in the bottoms and sprinkled dirt through them. The dirt in my backyard yielded a nice mix of dirt, small pebbles, and small pieces of wood, which gave a really nice effect. The only issue I has was that the resin would seep into the flock and create an area around the streams that would look odd. For this particular battle the streams were in flood historically, so the look was fine. In the future I'll do the resin pre flock. 

To finish I painted the edges, and finished the ballast at the track. That created all kinds of new drama. I watched a video on youtube about doing the ballast. So I gave the technique a try. First you place the ballast, then clean it up with a brush. After that you use a highly diluted mix of PVA and water and squirt it on the ballast. Needless to say it did not work as planned. My glue mix, instead of soaking in to the ballast, beaded off and ran all over the board. This caused me to redo a 3' section and make numerous repairs to the other flock. I went ahead and just brushed full strength PVA onto the tracks to get the desired look. It was a bit messy on the track portion but overall it looked good.

Overall I did try to do a fine spray of diluted PVA on the board but I could not get the right mix. Next time I'll probably just get the premade stuff to set the flock.You can see the finished product on my next post, along with the AAR of the battle.