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Hello all! I am working on finishing up my layout this summer, since I have finally graduate College and with life fast approaching I'd like to shift from "white elephant never-ending construction mode" to a point where I can sit back and declare victory and start focusing more on operations. I am rethinking my long term plan to do a low rock cliff wall type of scenery, based techniques of an escarpment diorama I built many years ago, where I simply broke in half a lot of homoesote, used the irregular resulting breaks to represent shale like cliffs, and glued the lot back together and seniced. I wanted to know if anyone else had tried this method on a larger scale, since the terrain feature would be maybe 5ft long and quite narrow depth wise. I am half tempted, being low on both money, materials, and skills, to simply grass and tree up the offending area and move on the next scene, the industrial scene, on my layout.

See the attached (ancient now) picture. The area in question is the long narrow section between the wall and track. I was wondering if maybe a simpler scenery would do just as well to break up the background, but not get in the way?

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The "broken edges" method is an old-school technique that still works very well. It is my favorite technique for modeling sedimentary rock faces. I have never tried it with Homasote. It is more typically done with ceiling tiles, which is more brittle and I suspect may give better results.

There is no problem at all making expansive escarpments using this technique. Just break things up with an occasional change of pitch and/or vertical fault lines.flats 2mirror 10RaisedTrack 2walls 12

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Last edited by Avanti

it looks like you have at least 1" along the wall. Standing 1/2" foam on the edge would allow you to profile or create a silhouette with relief of the top edge and placing one in front of another. 

If you just want the wall escarpment, hacking 1/2" or 1" foam is easy with whatever tools you can find. Latex paint covers it nicely.

The foam board isn't cheap, so keep your eyes open for a new commercial building going up when they insulate the exterior. There's lots of cut-off's.

Something like this before shaping

relief_with_foam_board

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