Since my last post I had glued hydrocal rock castings to the mountains on the newer section and colored them after having glued the tunnel portals and retaining walls in place. The next set of photos shows the progress.

This is the newest section I mentioned in a previous post with the mountains and portals in place.

These next three show the larger of the mountains with the most rocks  after I started coloring them using the leopard spotting technique shown by the folks at Woodland Scenics using their pigments. I ended up using three secondary colors (raw umber, burnt umber and stone gray) which were mixed with water at a 1/16 ratio and I used slate gray as my primary color with a 1/32 ratio.

This next one shows some of them after applying a wash of scenics cement, letting it dry then applying a black wash with water at a 1/16 ratio to bring out the shadows a bit. Finally, you seal it all with another wash of scenic cement. In my earlier trials with the other mountains I sometimes applied more than one black wash to really make the shadows "pop" but you end up darkening the rock surfaces a  bit as well so you have to be careful of your ratio and how much you apply.

This is the final product of the whole shebang. I apologize for the poor lighting. The lights are better over the rest of the layout and I plan to add track lighting or something of that sort eventually.

Retaining walls installed before coloring rocks.

I don't love the way the back wall "overtakes" the portal but that is a small hiccup in my planning. However, when the tables are put together you can only get within about 3 1/2 or 4 feet of it so it actually looks fine from viewing distance. I will also add moss and greenery eventually and that will help hide some of the imperfections.

This is another before/after photo of another mountain showing what a difference some color on the rocks and surrounding hillside makes.

The cluster of houses bottom right are just where I dumped them to get out of the way of something else I was working on.

These are some portals installed on another part of the layout.

Incidentally, the process of coloring the rocks in the first set of photos only took me about 3 1/2 hrs total. What you don't see is along with that newer section I had rocks on another mountain I colored at the same time.

Next time, I will discuss some things I would do differently if I started the layout from scratch and ask for advice on how to fix two problems I've created by my original choice of scenery placement.

Anthony