How to make grass in 1/35th scale?

Hello everyone,

Since the project I'm working on now requires some grass on its base I decided to share with you step by step the method I use to simulate it. The advantages of this method are the following: it is cheap, you can choose the length and the color of the grass that you wish and it only needs some basic tools that most modellers already own. The big disadvantage is that it is a REALLY time consuming method... so if you want to make a lot of grass be prepared to spend some hours on this...

This first pic shows you the final result and the following pics are a step by step guide to achieve this.

These are all the tools and materials that you need: white glue, rope, acrylic paint, pigments, water, an old brush, a thin brush, a drilling tool (+ eventually a pointy tool) and tweezers.

Take a piece of rope and make knots in it.

Take the rope behind a knot.

Comb the rope with a pointy tool or with your tweezers so that you get a lot of tiny filaments.

Cut the rope behind every knot and paint every piece of it with diluted acrylic paint.

Dry all the pieces on kitchen paper in order to reach a variation in the color used thanks to absorption of various amount of paint by the kitchen paper.

Once dried, comb the pieces again with a pointy tool.

Drill little holes in the base (which I often make from isolation foam on which I spread a mixture af sand, paint, pigments, water and wall filler).

With a thin brush pour a mixture of water, white glue and pigments in the little holes. Then, with your tweezers, press the pieces of grass in the base. Once in place, add eventually a bit more of the white glue mixture mentionned hereabove.

Here is the result once the whole base is covered with grass.

To add more variation in the color of the grass, spray some color with an airbrush. I used some buff here to simulate the kind of grass that you can see around september in Europe.

I also drilled holes in the base and used the white glue mixture to fix some more vegetation from Joefix Studio. This base will be used for the TKS that is undergoing the last step of weathering and which is almost finished.

I hope you enjoyed this step by step guide and wish it can eventually help you for the realisation of one of your projects.

Happy modelling!