Tutorial: How to create a garden / yard
For the gravel area: made a ring of cardboard, painted it in copper and glued to the board. Glued two layers of gravel in the area to have a fully covered surface. All this done, the fun part starts! Cut and glue the ‘lawn’. I got the right height and color from the model railway shop. Planting the flower beds is easy: just get the plant material you want and stick it into the oasis. Voilà! The ‘fire ring’ (www.feuerring.ch) is made from oven-bake clay and painted with acrylic bronze and ‘metal’ on the rim and inside. The stools I made in my workshop: grinded pieces of wood. Material needed: Baseboard from thin MDF or cardboard Oasis – the stuff used for making dry flower arrangements (Switzerland: Migros) Styrofoam glue, cement-like (Switzerland: Migros) Acrylic paints in browns and black (for soil) Acrylic spray paint in greens (for tree) Lawn from any model railway shop (Heki, dunkelgrün Wildgras 1862) Fire-ring: oven-bake clay, paint: Tamiya dark Copper and X-10 metal (Switzerland: Conrad) Decide on size and layout of the garden and cut a base. I used dry oasis for the flowerbeds and an elevation area for the trees.
Glued these with Styrofoam glue on the base and worked them into the desired shape with knives, the Stanley Shaver and other rasps. The material is extremely easy to shape.
Apply Styrofoam glue on the oasis so that it can be painted with any acrylic paint. Best to use a spatula to give it some texture.
Tree: this is a little tricky since you need to find a plant that is finely branched at the top. I found a quite common and widely used Spirea variety and let it dry out completely.
Spray-painted it with various green acrylics and painted the stems again in brown – and glued it into the lawn elevation I prepared.