Grain Fields

I finally sussed out how to turn some scrap fun fur into grain fields.

Mrs Rabbitman used to make dolls and puppets and I kept some scraps of the fur, thinking to make thatched cottages and such out of them.

Well, my Medieval village is now looking pretty good thanks to the 4Ground and Perry cottages, saving me the trouble of making more cottages. So I thought I could turn them into fields of standing grain useful for everything from foraging Romans to roaming Panzers on the steppes.

The trouble is the colours of said fun fur were not very grainy. One piece was white. The other pieces were striped grey and off-white. Although this made for some very nice Big Bad Wolves, fields of standing grain it does not.

How to colour it? At first I thought tea, but the fibers are synthetic and I didn't think the tea would hold. Then I remembered my pail of chocolate brown latex paint I used for all my Northwest Frontier mountains and rocks. I thinned some of that down in a big bucket and soaked the pieces. The solution was I fear too watery and it ran off, so I ended up pouring paint right on and smudging it around with my rubber gloved hands.

Here are the results hanging to dry in the yard.

Not a promising start...

The piece on the far right of the picture started out white and got the heaviest rubbing in of brown paint. The piece on the left got the lightest treatment. You'll notice the drizzling of brown paint turning the lawn brown.... fortunately Mrs. Rabbitman doesn't care about having a perfect golf green lawn either!

The Mad Padre inspected my Work In Progress rather dubiously last night. But today I took them back outside and gave them a good misting of Krylon satin finish Almond spray paint.

And got this:

The piece in the upper right corner is the formerly white chunk of fur. It is heavily matted. So it will either represent grain heavily trampled by cavalry charges or rampaging tanks, or it will just be rough scrub in the Backest of Beyonds.

I couldn't resist setting up a quick vignette to see how photogenic my new grain fields are:

Hmmm... looking a bit too much like fur

Well, better from this angle

Well, not bad. Didn't cost me anything. I need to spend a bit more time with a brush getting everything standing up again.