Creating a Foam Backdrop - Carving Rock into Foam Board - Model Railroad Scenery

welcome back to d.a griffin hobby my name is dave and today i'm working with foam surprise isn't it [Music] one of the first things i did when i decided to build this layout was to start searching on youtube and other sources online for videos of techniques of carving foam now i'm wishing i had really kept track of what i picked up from where because what i'm doing now is really the product of all those different techniques and different examples that i saw but this is one that i kind of just discovered came up with put together adapted recently and i've been enjoying doing it so i just wanted to show you how i'm doing this one particular project take the utility knife and run it down the middle just enough to cut the path doesn't matter if it's in the middle you should try to make it straight up and down though if you can [Music] then flip the piece over and do it on the other side and then you just need to keep cutting further and further down through the piece so as you go you want to see if you start pulling it apart [Music] you pull too hard though and you'll just snap the thumb now you might be wondering why am i going through all this effort just to cut this piece in half two part answer the first is that with the other knife i was using i would have had this cut in half already also the actual cutting of it adds a good amount of texture to the piece this is a lot more strawing than cutting as i did on the other ones so i'm interested to see how this actually turns out what i was using was just this knife but then you know i'm not using it properly by extending the whole blade it doesn't have the strength for that but it's usually pretty good if you keep it straight unfortunately i turned it and snapped the blade off because that's how these work so a lot of like at the moment because this is not working you can either let the situation beat you or you can come back with a bigger tool of course now the chances of you locking a finger off are pretty good but i'll be careful [Music] and there you go not what i intended this machete for but the heck you buy a machete for anyway i don't know why i have it zombie apocalypse i think now that was definitely my first real don't try this at home moment i do not recommend using a machete for that especially not one of that design did i cut myself only a little but look at this texture i mean that's got to be worth it i almost don't want to continue with this i kind of want to leave it like this so i'm going to put one of these aside and take my wire brush and go for it and just do a light scraping [Music] now keep in mind this makes one heck of a mess i would not want to do this in the house luckily i'm in the garage okay i put the wire brush down and i've got my uh stripping brush i'm applying a little more pressure with this one i want to see if i can scrape off some of the loose pieces [Music] and also rough up any areas that might be smooth go on to the next part of this project we need a utility knife and a sparkle knife this one's what one inch some of this turned out pretty well on its own this contour here is pretty nice actually looks like a face eyes nose mouth i'm just going to cut on a shallow angle across the face then you take the speckle knife put it into the cut and just pop pieces off and i think that gives a pretty decent contour in the rock there so i just tried to [Music] follow a similar pattern sometimes it's hard to remember where the cutter is hard to see it too it doesn't really matter you can just pick at it now you can vary the angles a little bit but like on this piece i don't want to cut through it [Music] i was doing this procedure by one of my tunnel entrances and i had a lot more depth to play with so i was able to get some more different angles in there to vary the appearance don't always don't always follow the same direction either this here was already kind of shaped so i figured i'd keep it shaped there seems like a little bit of a boulder and so i'm just going to keep doing this [Music] hello [Music] okay so i'm done with the cuts you want to just take a moment and make sure you don't have any patterns that repeat too closely i'm pretty happy with this now i'm going to go back to my stripping brush kind of scrape it the direction of the cuts i made [Music] now if there are any pot spots you don't want to break off like the face here uh don't scrape that part [Music] so this not only takes off the loose pieces but it adds some scratches in the surface give it a little more texture and it softens some of the spots that are just a little too sharp [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] that's not bad for a few minutes of work it really didn't take that long and it's given me a nice contoured and a regular piece to use between the outer loop and the wall give the project a try let me know what you think let me know if it works for you let me know if you have any recommendations thank you for watching i hope you enjoyed the video please remember to like comment subscribe and i'll see you next time on d.a griffin hobby you

Channel: dagryffyn hobby

Views: 18,817

Keywords: Lionel trains, Ogauge, O scale, Model scenery, Foam carving, Foam rocks, Foam rock wall, Foam sculpting, Train layout, Model railroad, O gauge trains, Diorama

Id: LkNummMrBy4

Length: 10min 56sec (656 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 22 2021