It’s a question every model airport creator may ask.

How will I make grass for my scale airport ?

From my experience, I have seen a great change on my own diorama when I decided to add some modeled grass.

And I advise everybody to do it too.

Today, I will share with you the 2 ways to make model grass : the common method, and the fancy one.

They are both suitable for every scale airport, 1/500, 1/400 or 1/200.

Let’s get started :

1. The grass mat

This is the easiest way to model grass and add great texture for a fair price.

It doesn’t require much effort.

The mat just needs to be cut out, trimmed and glued on your diorama.

Personally, this is the option I currently have for my model airport. I have an old grass mat that I used years ago for a model train. I just spray-painted it with yellow-green to have it look fresher.

If you don’t have a grass mat available at home (which is likely to happen), you can buy one on Amazon, Ebay or any model store.

To choose the product, I recommend to look carefully to the dimensions of the area provided by the seller, to make sure you will have enough grass for the whole required surface.

Besides, try not to choose a dark green, otherwise the diorama will not be light enough for good visual looking.

For example, I would be interested in something like that.

However, it depends on which season you want to reproduce. A yellow-green which is more fitted for autumn, or a fresh green for summer?

The next step is to glue parts of the mat on your foil

I suggest to use a PVA glue that dries clear to not have any visible stain.

I invite you to watch this video on YouTube which explains well the whole process for a model airport, from the cutting to the bonding.

Let’s move on to the other means!

2. The flocking grass

To be honest, I found out this technique recently.

Actually, I didn’t know how it worked, so I watched a bunch of videos about it.

It sounded a bit time-consuming to me, and restricted to professional dioramas.

To sum it up, flocking is the technique of spreading carefully a lot of little pigmented particles (mainly sawdust, foam or static fibers) on an area covered with glue. The powder adheres then to the surface.

In our case of grass, the pigmented particles are green or yellow-green.

You can buy flocking material in stores, online, or even make it by yourself.

I watched an amazing video showing how to create your own flocking powder using sawdust and water-based paints. Watch it here.

It made me understand that it’s not as complicated as I thought.

And the amazing results are worth the time spent into the process.

It gives a lot of flexibility, and enable you to manage every area of your grass with different powder, to make it as realistic as possible.

In the future, if I think about remaking my grass area, I will probably be using this method.

As a conclusion :

Grass mat : I recommend this option to the beginners who want a realistic grass texture easily.

Flocking : I will advise this technique to these who want to upgrade their diorama to the next level of realism, and control accurately their grass area.

Feel free to comment here below about your way to do it !

See you next week,

Olivier