Building its own ground foil from A to Z is an individual satisfaction.

And when I say A to Z, I mean the runway, the taxiways, the apron, the signs, the grass, the marking, etc.

People would prefer to paint everything by hand on a wooden board, using different ranges of paintbrushes for big areas and line painters for tiny markings. This is personally what I did for my own airport diorama.

Others may choose a base of card stocks, drawing lines with markers or pens, and making concrete with pastel powder, like in this video.

Some people even print textures from the Internet (grass, asphalt) and add them to their ground.

The common point between them ?

They all decided to have the freedom of making their own layout from their imagination.

And this is great, because they can modify it when they are willing to.

But…

Any of the process above takes time. Sometimes a lot.

And it requires skills. Patience, manual dexterity, accuracy. A good creativity too.

It can be really funny to build everything by itself, and if you can do it, I would suggest for you to try.

But it can be easily a headache. Especially for small airport scales (1/500) where some details become very tiny to paint or to draw.

And this is okay, because there is an alternative.

An alternative for people, maybe like you, who don’t want to spend time and much efforts building and designing a ground layout.

For people who don’t want to take the risk of having something rough, or unrealistic.

For people who want to avoid buying a lot of different painting or drawing tools.

Or for those who just don’t have skills in drawing.

This alternative…

it’s not buying an expensive heavy foil in one piece, provided by some companies.

I’m talking about pre-printed ground cards, that you have to print and cut out. These are much cheaper than heavy foils.

This is an easy way to get a realistic ground quickly.

You download the file, and you’re almost ready to show your models !

To get familiar with this kind of product, I’m providing, for free, a pre-printed part of my own airport, that you can download here

Don’t miss this opportunity !

Good luck with your diorama,

See you next week,

Olivier