There are many ways to create scenic grass indoors. One approach is to use one of the commercial products available. My first attempt at grass for the CR&DJR use Woodlands Scenic's "ground cover" which is a crumbled foam available in various colors. Here you can see the result:
The colors are good, and its pretty easy to use. The downsides are that the texture is wrong and it would be expensive to cover large areas this way. The texture is the biggest problem: it just doesn't look much like grass, it looks like colored, crumbled foam. The cost isn't insignificant either since I have several hundred square feet of scenery to cover which would cost many hundreds of dollars with this or other commercial products.
A number of modelers have tried alternative methods. I was particularly impressed by the effect created by Harold Minkwitz for his Pacific Coast Air Line Railway. He uses fake fur for his On30 and HO models to great effect. This got me interested in trying some furry of my own.
The first step was to buy some fake fur. After trying a couple of local shops, I located a great fabric store called Discount Fabrics. They have all sorts of interesting and unusual fabrics in stock, including a range of fake furs. So I brought 10 square feet of a short-haried brown fake fur:
Here you see a small offcut of the fur on the workbench. It looks a lot like a real fur pelt, but not sufficiently like grass. The hairs are too uniform, too long and obviously the wrong color. Also, the fur is designed to lie with all the hairs oriented in the same direction: this is much too uniform and is unnatural for real grassland.
The first step, then is to cut down the length of the hairs. An ordinary pair of kitchen scissors are used to cut down the grass. I do this pretty roughly because I want to reproduce uneven moorland grassland, not a manicured urban lawn. Cut against the nap of the fur to help the strands stick up and feel free to leave clumps of taller grass as well as shorter areas where the sheep have grazed.
Here's what it looks like after hacking away for a few minutes. This process generates a lot of short hairs which will get everywhere. Wear old clothes, put down paper to catch the falling hairs and you may even consider a breathing mask if you have asthma or similar problems.
I've left the grass here quite long: you can vary the effect by cutting longer or shorter, of course.
The next step is to move from golden brown to green. This of course requires paint. I use acrylic artists paints. Your local art store will be able to supply these, typically in tubes. I use a brand called Golden Acrylics, their "Terre Verte Hue" gives a good basic grass green. The individual tubes are quite expensive, but they will cover a surprisingly large area. At first I experiemented with a good artist's brush, but actually I ended up using a really cheap paintbrush from my local hardware store; it works just as well and at only 55 cents is great value. I just squeeze a little paint on the brush, and start working it into the cut fur:
Painting does several things apart from just coloring the strands: it also stiffens the individual strands so they stand up and the brushwork raises the hair from its nap. Be vigorous in your brushing and really work against the grain to get the grass to stand upright. The aim is not toget too even a color: real grassland is highly variagated with individual blades varying greatly from their neighbors. In fact you'll find it almost impossible to completely coat the fur, you'll get patches of brown and lighter greens, which just adds to the realism. This is why the original golden brown fur I was lucky enough to chose works so well: avoid darker colors and especially the dayglo fake furs that you can find.
Here's a closeup of the finished article:
Finally a ground-level view of the grass with a couple of Perfect World carriages in the background to give a sense of scale. While the grass isn't perfect, I am very pleased with it, especially as the cost is low and you can "mass produce" large areas quickly:
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