Model Railroad Blog

The image above illustrates perfectly the brownish/gray tone I’ve been trying to replicate with my do-it-yourself static grass dying project. Finally, I think I have it dialed in.

Before we start, we need to make our own neutral brown powdered dye because the Proceon MX Chocolate brown is way to red. For our purposes we’ll call our concoction “Custom Brown”. Since you’ll need a fair amount of it, make a mid-sized batch and put in a canister or ziplock bag. Mix 3 parts Proceon MX “Bright Green” #097 and 2 parts Proceon MX “Chocolate Brown” #119 and set it aside for future use.

Now that we have our batch of “Custom Brown” mixed up, time to get work. Following the dying instructions from previous blogs, put your 3 cups of water in a pan. Dump in 3/16 teaspoons of our “custom brown” in the water as well as 3/32 teaspoon Warm Black Proceon #128. Dump in some Woodland Scenics FS620 4mm Straw colored static grass and dye as per previous blogs and let dry. It should be a soft nutmeg color.

Once that’s done, take the nutmeg colored static grass, put some in a plastic yogurt cup and pour in an India Ink wash of 1 tsp ink/pint of alcohol. Let dry. That’s it! It should look like what you see in the photo above.

Because powdered dyes are so powerful, you are often working with minute quantities. It became apparent that measuring spoons in very small sizes would be a real help. I found the spoons above on Amazon which come in 1/16 and 1/32 sizes. Click HERE for the page.

There has been a lot of interest in my earth tone static grass experimentation. At this point I have it dialed in enough to pass on the techniques. Before I get started, I want to emphasize that this process is extremely simple and the materials very inexpensive. It will take me longer to write this than it will for you to prepare the bath. Essentially we are putting Woodland Scenics Straw colored static grass in a pot of water with dye in it, waiting an hour, then rinsing it out. Powdered dyes are tricky so I suggest not going “free range” on color mixing at first since I’ve already spared you the agony of that long process. We’ll be using Proceon MX dyes and Woodland Scenics 4mm Straw Static Grass pn FS620. Other lengths and makes of grass will not react the same with the dyes so be careful (The exception being Woodland Scenics 7mmn FS 624 which tested fine).

So far I’ve dialed in two useful colors, a pale slate gray and chestnut brown. You’ll need: A stove pot, non-iodized salt (grocery story), a thermometer, Jacquard Procion MX dyes: Neutral Gray, Chocolate Brown, and Bright Green. These can be found at a good art supply store or obtained from Dick Blick. You’ll also need soda ash and Syntrapol ( a soap). Both are cheap and easily found at Dick Blick.

For the slate gray. Put three cups of water in the pot and dissolve in 3 tablespoons of non-iodized salt. Warm up to 105 degrees. Pour in 1/8 teaspoon of Neutral Gray and mix it into the water. Pour in half a bag (20 grams) of the Woodland Scenics Straw colored static grass and stir it in. Let it sit for 20 minutes. Add 1/2 tablespoon of soda ash, stir it in, let stand another 30 minutes. That’s it. Now we need to rinse it. Pour everything through a strainer and then rinse back and forth between the strainer and pot until the water runs clear. A drop of Synthrapol helps rinse things out. Squeeze the ball of dyed static grass dry in your hand, dump it in old pillow case, knot it, and stick it in the dryer.

Browns are much tougher as the Proceon Chocolate Brown has a red component that….just…..won’t…..give up the fight. Knocking it down was a battle and involved a heavy sledge hammer of green to bring it back to a truer brown. To get a brown that doesn’t have a rose/boxcar red color cast we need to work up a custom dye powder mix. Take out a sheet of paper and, using your measuring spoons, put three mounds of Brown on the paper and two mounds of Bright Green. In other words we want a 3:2 mix very heavy on the green. Mix the powders together with a knife blade. Using a knife fill 3/16 of teaspoon (1/8 tsp then half of 1/8 tsp) with your Brown/Green mix, pour it in your 3 cups of water and follow the procedure just explained for the gray.

My next experiment will be an attempt to add some “muddiness” to the color via Proceon’s “Warm Black”. Stay tuned.

Experimentation continues with producing the earth toned grasses. My kitchen table looks like Edison’s lab at this point. I’ve established a few things:

-The fibers will in fact accept the coloring.

-The composition of the Woodland Scenics fibers seems to work best.

-Grays are relatively straight forward to create which is great.

My biggest hurdle thus far has been with the browns as the Procean MX brown dye has a reddish cast. I tried to knock that down with olive, which didn’t work. Tech support from Jacquard, maker of the Procion MX dyes, is excellent however and they seem to have offered the solution. They wrote:

Hello lance,

You are correct that you should be knocking down reds with green. 
Now olive is sort of brown already, so it is a little more like adding brown, which will darken the color, but won’t knock it down as much as a brighter green.  You would be surprised. The more vibrant the green, the better it is at removing the red.  So while you used 20% olive, I would suggest more like 5-10% of bright green.  It will work much better to kill your red.  It is possible to overshoot and get a green brown, so it is best to add a little at a time. 

Alexander Preston

Chief Creative Strategist

Manufacturers of Jacquard Products

That’s next weekend’s project, going back to the drawing board using the mixing strategy Jacquard suggested.

The importance of a model railroad scenic feature can often be measured by the layout surface area it covers. By that measure, grass falls at the top of the list. Given it’s importance, it’s odd that it isn’t talked about more. For the most part it gets a passing treatment on layouts at best.

One of my primary modeling goals this year is to study this scenic feature more closely and take a really, really hard look at how to get much more effective results. In particular, finding a way to create the commonly fund earth tones. What this will entail is R&D, trial and error, and practicing different methods of application, mixing, and application.

As I mentioned in my recent book, color drives everything and grass is no different. While we have a great range of greens to choose from, the equally common earth tone colors are non-existent. Talking to various manufacturers, it’s clear that having browns, tans, and gray grass colors is going to be non-flyer anytime soon. It’s just not going to happen.

That leaves making it yourself as the only option, a task I’ve been putting off for years. No longer. It’s time to learn how to do this.

A friend referred me to an excellent YouTube tutorial by gtScottMiniatures which you can watch HERE . 

The technique in the video is simple and absolutely does work. The dyes are inexpensive and easily obtained through Dick Blick. The flock he mentions isn’t available but Woodland Scenic’s straw colored static grass/flock works absolutely fine.

Initial attempts to create various grays have been very successful. Up next will be the browns followed by different methods of mixing and application. Stay tuned!