DIY Naturalistic Enclosure Background for a Bearded Dragon

[Music] so [Music] [Laughter] [Music] [Laughter] [Music] [Laughter] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] hi i'm christy and you're watching the natural herp keeper we're pretty excited today to bring you our first ever youtube video for the natural herp keeper and to kick things off i thought i would jump in and run you guys through how i built the naturalistic background in the enclosure here behind me now this enclosure houses my nullarbor beta dragon that's this little dude here and i'm going to run you through step by step how that was created maybe give you some tips and hints along the way so you can do something similar yourself so i'm going to pop this little guy away and we're going to jump in and have a look all right so to jump right in guys obviously to start any enclosure build you need an enclosure so this one here is a custom build that i put together measures uh 1.4 meters long by 70 centimeters tall and 60 centimeters wide you'll also see i've got a few bits and pieces there to start the build my hot wire cutter can't get away without one of these and then you just want to start cutting and shaping your foam okay now this bit does get messy cutting any polystyrene without the hot foam cutter uh you're going to end up with a bit of a mess exactly like we're looking at here at the moment okay so it is important to get some of your shape in while you're putting your polystyrene together but you don't need to put all of it in okay so as you can see there's some shape we've got a little bit of contours where i'm going to have some of the cracks later on but it doesn't have to be all of it all right we're going to put a lot more of that detail in once we get to the final uh concrete and grout layers at the end so i usually hold all of these together with some timber toothpicks or bamboo toothpicks until i get the shape that i'm looking for and then silicon it all together now once it's all siliconed and expander foamed we're going to get onto grouting now you can see i've made a couple extra rocks there we'll put those together towards the end as well and this is basically what we're looking at once all the foam is in place we've expanded foamed any gaps carve that back so the grout will stick to it got all our tools ready everything's in place and it's time to start grouting now normally i'd do a light color grout as your first layer and then we're going to jump over to the dark color which is what we're looking at now okay so that's the second coat on now for making the grout mixture uh it is simply grout water and then adding your oxides to get your color in this mix i'm actually trying something a little bit different here and i'm adding some sand to the final layer of grout so i was going for a bit of a different texture in this hoping to get a bit more of that uh sand stoney limestoney sort of look so i've added that sand into that mixture to sort of roughen it up a little bit other builds where i want it to be a lot smoother obviously you wouldn't be putting that sand in so as you can see it's just straight oxide for colors a bit of fine play sand there and just a standard off the shelf grout okay nothing too extravagant so when it comes to putting the grout on often the first layer i'll pop on with a paint brush it allows you to get into all those little nooks and crannies a lot better the first layer would obviously usually go on quite a bit runnier as well once we get to this layer which is our third layer and our final layer for this build we're going to be putting it on fairly thick so i use my hands for this it's much easier i find i get a better result and i can get into all those little gaps a lot better as well i can also pack it on a lot thicker if i want to sculpt different areas now i'm using gloves in this it is handy to find yourself a good pair of gardening gloves that have a bit of grip to them if not you will lose countless layers of skin off your fingers and hand and that's not particularly fun so whack the gloves on doesn't make it a lot easier you'll also notice while i'm doing this that i'm using a bamboo skewer again and i use these just to help carve in little detail so i'm basically scraping out any extra grout that might be getting into uh you know the cracks or the places where i don't want it and also helping to push it in right to the back so there's no exposed foam or expander foam in any of those areas as well now putting the final coat on again this is sort of the time where you can be adding extra bits of grout so you can make this layer quite dry or firm so that you can actually build out from areas adding extra depth to the enclosure so you don't want to have things just fairly flat you want to try and get as much detail and different layers and depth into that as possible okay that's where it's really going to make the whole thing come together and not just look like a flat back wall with uh you know a bit of carving on it so add that to this final layer here so take your time with this one make sure that uh as you're working through it you're finding all that little detail i usually have quite a lot of reference material around me at this point so photos of the area that i'm looking at and um and that's what i work from so i'm continually continuously looking at those photos and going from there so now again slightly different for this uh final coat to what i've done before as the grout was wet as i'd put it on i actually i used that fine sand that we saw before and compacted that on so i pushed that into the grout just using handfuls of it at the time pushed it in as much as i possibly could while it was drying and we'll waiting to see if what sort of texture that would bring out so again it's all about trying new things if you don't like it it's as simple as getting another layer of grout and just redoing what you don't like okay so it is all experimentation and just giving it a shot again this is a bit of experimentation i haven't done this before using that sand i did just lightly spray it and then as it's mainly dried okay by this point go back brush off the extra sand and then i really start carving the detail into the rocks so again i've got my timber or bamboo skewer by this point your grout should ideally be almost dry but not completely so if it's completely dry you're not going to be able to carve it out very easily if you get it just before that point that it's really really dry usually for this one i waited about an hour before i went back and started carving and it was dry to the touch still cool so you can still feel it's a little bit damp in there and as you can see i can carve it out fairly easily so at this point i'm going through and adding all sorts of detail following what's already there in terms of the rock the line work what i think will look more natural and even just chipping away whole chunks okay so the idea of having a dark layered grout as your second layer and then your third layer is that light color on top as you'll see in these little bits as i'm chipping it away as i'm carving that out bits of that black second coat will come through now that's great that's what we're after it's going to help giving us that aged texture uh once we get to the end of the whole project okay now i know it kind of looks tedious putting all this little details in but this again once we start painting it at the end once we start aging it this is where all the detail is going to come into it okay this is what's going to actually make this stand out as a real rock and not just a flat piece of concrete so it's personal opinion what in personal preference what you like to do but for me i like to take the extra time and effort in this stage and really carve through as much detail even just scraping off a little bit so it's just not a flat even surface okay so standard tools of the trade uh paint brushes these are invaluable doesn't have to be anything expensive these are just the cheapest ones i can buy i go through them fairly quickly and it's just constantly pushing that stuff that you've scraped off or you've carved off getting that out of the way making sure your cracks and crevices are neat that you can see into them and just having a look at exactly what's happening how the carving's going where the lines are forming again i have huge amounts of reference material all around me at this stage i'm constantly going back to those having a look seeing what the rocks that i'm trying to replicate look like and just attempting to add that in doesn't all have to be straight lines you can have curves in there you can chip bits off you can have all bits and pieces whatever suits your taste and depends obviously on the the type of rocks that you're creating as well so this does take a fair amount of time okay this is not a quick process by any means this will for an average size enclosure like this the actual carving probably took me a good two to three hours to get this all done but as you can see you can really start to carve out chunks and really turn it into something pretty spectacular so it won't look like a lot again as you're carving it in you might think it doesn't look natural definitely but again once we start aging it once we get that paint on the black in there this is really going to make it stand out [Music] once you've finished carving everything basically final clean up so go through brush it all down i try and get out as much of the debris as i can with the dustpan and brush first and then get back in there with the vacuum cleaner and clean out all those little bits now if you've carved it a little bit too deep you've gone back to foam in a couple of spots that's not a problem okay don't stress about that once we get to the end like this all we're going to do is make a little bit more of our grout mixture and you can see here it's quite thick this time okay we're fairly dry thick and firm and we're just going to go and patch up any of those little holes so um again using my trusty little timber skewer to get into those spots and just covering those up as much as possible okay that'll just prevent any insects or bugs from getting in there and chewing your foam so that's something that you definitely don't want to happen so it is important to make sure that all of your foam is covered in a good layer that will prevent any of your either feeder insects that might get away or indeed your cleanup crew from chewing holes in your background so just make sure once you get to this point that you go back and just double check all those little cracks and crevices as well that you've created and make sure that everywhere is covered and fill up any little gaps that you might find along the way so once you've completed all of that the next stage we're going to get on to is aging so you've probably heard me talk about this a little bit before um by aging i mean we need to make these rocks look like they're old so the easiest way i've found to do this is give the entire enclosure a light spray down with water to start with you don't want this soaking wet but you just want the whole thing lightly covered okay this is going to help the water spread so we don't end up with actual droplets of color on the wall okay it's going to spread through it and just make it look like it's in the rock work itself so to make the spray it's simply acrylic black paint a small amount of that in a spray bottle filled up with water shake it well until it's all mixed and dissolved and then spray it on now you'll see in little bits like this i'm going to go back and actually add extra water and extra black so i'm going to put the black in the crevices i'm going to concentrate it in a few areas come back my spray bottle of water give it a light spray on the open surfaces so that way i'm going to get a much darker look in the crevices than what's on the outside of the rock so again we're trying to make those crevices nice and dark nice and black that's going to give the illusion that it's a deep crevice going well back into the rock face and lightening the outside of the rocks a little bit now if you put your black paint on and you get a great big splodge of it somewhere or you get actual droplets that you don't want just get back in there with your freshwater spray bottle spray some on that should usually clear it up pretty quickly if it doesn't you can of course just rub it off as well at that point when it's quite wet now for this one i actually let the water and the black paint pool in that top basking rock there okay so the idea for that is it would be where water would naturally pull out in the wild and once it dries we're going to get a really nice gray wash in that area looking like it's somewhere where water would have sat and then dried off over time now this does make a mess okay i'm not gonna lie you get black everywhere i usually just grab an old towel and mop up the bottom of the enclosure it doesn't have to be bone dry but obviously you don't want water sitting in the bottom there so we just mop that up but it is going to make a mess okay probably should have worn gloves at this stage because it did end up everywhere you'd think i would know by now but alas i haven't and i still end up with hands covered in black paint for days so learn from my mistake and put your gloves on now we did the same technique on these sort of individual rocks as we did on the main wall so i as the concrete or the grout on here was put on quite wet and quite thick i pushed on as much sand as i could as well left them to dry and now what i'm doing is just brushing that sand off okay so simply again paintbrush going around giving it a good scrub seeing what it comes off and what doesn't come off i was pretty impressed with this technique it actually got a really nice sandstone limestoney effect and it looks a lot different to most of the other builds that i've done which is pretty cool so again it is all about trial and error you just have to get out there and give these guys a shot and see what you come up with and if you don't like it you simply go back fix it and do it again so you'll see i've made quite a few rocks here i do think it is really important to have a lot of extra small rocks that you can put into your enclosure at the end i think this is one part that really makes it it's not something i've always done it's something i've only started doing recently and i really think this helps to bring the entire enclosure together if you can have these extra rocks that blend in exactly to your background they look like part of the enclosure it just brings the entire thing together and you can see the detail in these rocks here so the next thing we're going to get stuck into once everything is dry usually about 24 hours after doing the uh the black aging coat before i start this next section and this is just really getting that depth into all your cracks and crevices so again i've just got straight black acrylic paint i've got a little container of water there i use quite a fine paint brush for this and i'm usually watering it down not as much as we did in that black aging spray so it's not as watered down as that but a little bit will just help it spread into the grout without looking like you're painting a solid line now these areas are going to look a lot darker they will stand out but don't worry we will blend all of that in once we start getting our other colors so for the rest of the paint what i like to do is a dry brush method i'm pretty basic i start with a few fairly basic colors usually red yellow sometimes i'll have a brown in there black and white okay nothing too spectacular or complicated and i have a fairly stiff brustled brush for this again only fine it's a small enclosure so i'm only using fine brushes and what you want to do is get a little bit of paint on your brush i usually just mix together the colors until i find something that works and then you want to brush off as much extra paint as possible so you don't want that much paint left on your brush okay we want to be putting this on very very sparsely we don't want it to look like we've just finger painted the enclosure and covered it in in a thick layer of paint that's going to look fake we don't want that okay so we want it to go on very very fine and just bits of it okay we don't want to solid paint all that good texture that we've just spent the last few days creating so we're just going to put it on in little bits over the top so it's important to have a nice dry brush and then we're going to layer the colors so i usually like to start with a base layer first and that's usually going to be a really light color okay so i'm going to put something on uh that'll probably be the lightest of all the shades that will go into it cover it in that up to you how you do it i will usually do one color at a time and i'll do the whole enclosure at least a big section of it in that color now i don't match the colors exactly i find i just mix the color until it's close enough and then whack it on and blend them in the idea of doing this i guess is that it definitely helps make it look a little bit more natural okay nothing's a solid color out there it's all different shades it's all blending together so that's what i'm trying to replicate so it's just lots of different colors dry dry brush fairly stiff crystals and then we just keep going over it and i'll often go over the same area quite a few times with different colors to sort of get that effect going again this is a fairly time consuming part of the project but for me this is the section that i absolutely love this is where your enclosure will really start to take shape and it'll really start to come together and you'll see you know that image that you've been thinking that image that you've been looking at through all your reference material this is where it's going to come to life okay so this for me is the most rewarding part of building any of these enclosures is really getting in and getting this paint on and you know trying to match it to the rocks that i've got that reference material [Music] for [Music] in terms of putting it on it is basically just sort of dabbing and lightly brushing over the top so again because we're trying to be really light with our color you're not wanting to push it in too hard you're not wanting to soak your rocks in it you're wanting to just sort of take it over the surface and just lightly cover some of those areas this is going to give you the best sort of outcome at the end as well and you'll see here you're just layering all those different colors so as i said start with your lighter colors first and then we're going to work through different shades up until the final one which is going to be the darkest color that you put on so we're going to go back over it towards the end and we're going to get a darker color just to again touch up that aging and highlight any specific areas that you're looking to highlight and you can see here instantly by putting those darker lines those crevices aren't that deep at all maybe five to ten mils okay but by putting that darker line through them and then using the lighter paints around them really helps to bring out that crevice and it makes it look a lot deeper than what it actually is so we're going for a lot of illusion here trying to create rocks that look as natural as possible again it is all trial and error okay so don't stress if you don't get the exact color that you wanted first time around just keep working with it as long as you're not putting the colors on too thick you won't have a problem going back and re-ageing it and if you really have to you can start right from the very beginning go back your black aging over it let it dry and just start again if you're really unhappy with it but most of the time i found you can just change the areas that you want by changing your color a little bit going back changing your brush strokes and you'll soon have something that you're you're happy with [Music] so we're just going to go through and speed this up quickly for you but um we'll get a bit of a look as it races through here nice and quickly you'll see how those rocks are changing as you add the different layers of color to them [Music] and as i said i'll go back and do the same piece time and time again until i get the color that i'm looking for so what we're looking at now is i've decided once i got to this point that i wasn't really happy with how dark the enclosure was i didn't think it was looking like the reference material that i had okay so like i said before if you're not happy with something go back and do it again so i'm gonna go back now i'm adding a lot more black so it's going on again quite watery i've watered down that black quite a lot i'm using a paint brush this time instead of spray bottle so that i can target the areas that i'm looking for now i'm going to go back and do this across the entire enclosure or most of it i'm going to look for areas that i really want to highlight i'm going to make the black that i put on those areas a lot darker and a lot thicker in terms of how much paint is in the water than other areas now of course we need to do the individual rocks so again exactly the same we're going to water those down i'm putting this on really dark this time to match those inside rocks and then again we're going to go back this is the following day i like to leave anything when you're using that uh watered down black it is usually 12 to 24 hours to dry before you go back and start painting with your acrylics over the top this just gives it a really good time to dry out you'll find as it dries the color is going to change a lot normally it lightens a fair bit so it'll give you a better indication if you start putting things on wet i found once it dries you're going to lose a lot of your color so as well as doing the background it is of course important that we jump in and do the rocks as i said before it's important to have these rocks they bring the entire enclosure together and we need them to match the background they need to look like smaller shards that have broken off over time you know through weather events so again this gives you a little bit probably closer view of just how i'm aging these rocks that black layer went on the day before and now we're going to start with our different colors so we've got that dry brush method we're going to cover most of it in in our first color which will be the lightest color that we put on you will see how the rock on the left there is quite dark that's what the one on the right that i'm working on started like so don't be concerned if you think you've done it too dark you can always lighten it up with your painting and you'll see this rock really come together as you start getting all those different shades of color in there now once you do get all your bulk color on you can of course go back through and highlight different areas you can start to add you know maybe limestone where it's dripped down you've got a white streak a black streak maybe in some areas could be appropriate where algae and water have run down a rock face and even putting tinges of green and yellow in there to look like different sort of moss and algae that might be growing on that rock as well so you can get in there and get all those little shades and colors and really start to make this look like you want it to look okay it's all up to individual preference on what you're going for and your reference material what you're looking for and how much detail you want to add in so again last coat for this one i'm using a really fine brush and i've got a dark color this is the darkest color i'm going to put on this rock and i'm going back over different areas just to highlight it to sort of age that lighter colors that we put on i know it seems a bit odd doing it back to front you put your black on then you lighten it and then you put black on again but i find it has given the best results so once all of that's done of course all our painting is finished it's time to start getting our substrate in so uh for my substrate mix i'm using a standard potting mix i use some orchid bark some peat moss some sphagnum moss some coarse and fine sand whatever i have on hand really and some activated charcoal or some potting charcoal as well the stuff you'd use for um propagation so i chuck this all together in a rubbish bin give it a good mix and this is going to be my plant base layer so it's not the entire enclosure we are going to cap it off with something to suit the theme but this is the layer where all our plants are going to grow so again sphagnum going in i haven't got any great recipe uh or amounts i kind of just mix it at a whim uh the last bit that we just threw in is some compost as well so i have compost piles i have a worm farm and i'll often get bits of soil and broken down food matter and vegetable matter that's been broken down by the worms and the bugs in those and throw that into my garden mix all into my plant mix as well if i get a pile of worms in there even better that starts off my entire cleanup crew for the enclosure so this is the consistency that we're looking for it's basically something that's going to be pretty well drained so in terms of substrate for this enclosure i use a mixture of coarse sand and deco or decomposed granite i have some stones laying around some small pebbles so that's what i used as a drainage layer followed by some fly screen over the top to stop any of our soil getting down start putting your soil in and then it's a matter of deciding where your plants are going to go in terms of choosing plants you need to obviously look at your lighting levels this is a very bright enclosure it has a lot of high powered leds in there and also i like to try and choose my plants to look as natural as possible from the area uh that i'm building the enclosure to replicate so these are all you know fairly small shrubs i'll link all the plants that i've used down in the comments there as well but basically try and get those in get your top layer in which in this case is the san diego level and then get your rocks in there as well now you want to put them in and then put a lot of that top layer back around so you want to be able to have your rocks built in not looking like they're just sitting on the surface [Music] [Music] [Music] so from here we're almost finished it's just a matter of putting in the final touches now i'm pretty lucky i have a lot of native plants in my yard and garden so i was basically just able to go out forage around find some leaf litter um some seed pods some sticks from plants that are very similar to the ones that i've put into the enclosure i was able to bring those back crush them up a little bit get that aged look to them sprinkle them throughout the enclosure it's these fine details that really do help to bring everything together so you can see how the leaf litter the sand it's kind of mixed up it's scattered over the rock work it's not just on the ground okay you want to make this look like it would out in nature so we're looking at bits of sticks and seed pods bits of sand everything's mixed in and that gives that final touch for us [Music] all right well that wraps things up folks i hope you enjoyed uh that little video maybe you learned a few tips and tricks in there about having a go at making your own naturalistic background for your reptiles if you enjoyed what you saw today make sure you give us a thumbs up and subscribe to the channel and if there's anything else you would like to know maybe a little bit more in-depth information on a certain topic regarding building or keeping our reptiles then feel free to drop those in the comments for me you can also find us of course on facebook and instagram so thanks for watching and we will see you on the next episode of the natural herp keeper

Channel: The Natural Herp Keeper

Views: 161,448

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Id: y_Yo1o5yU30

Length: 35min 33sec (2133 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 22 2020