Concrete retaining walls

[Dani]

I am trying to reproduce a concrete retaining wall in my layout. I have an exact idea of what I want, but still don't know how to do it, materials, paint, and colours to obtain a realistic effect.

Viewing the post from Westfalen about his 9th travel to Japan there is a photo about an HO scale layout that has exactly what I want to reproduce (see the attached photo).

I would really appreciate your ideas and tips to reproduce that concrete retaining wall as in the photo. I read a modelling technique to reproduce concrete texture consisting in adding talcum powder to a base grey paint. The support for that painting can be thin wood or styrofoam.

Anybody has any experience to share?

Thanks to all in advance, as always!!!!

Dani.

[scott]

If you need lots of them, you could make one in craft clay, bake it hard, then make a latex mold. You can then make lots of copies with plaster. This is how I've been making my tunnel portals.


The red ones are the clay models. The gray and white ones are the plaster copies.

[KenS]

Similarly, I made a couple of cast retaining walls using casting plaster and a master built from sheet and strip styrene.  There's a write-up about it on my site.

[nik_n_dad]

I've used two:

Flexible stone walls from chooch:

http://www.choochenterprises.com/

and the plaster walls from woodland scenics:

http://woodlandscenics.woodlandscenics.com/show/Item/C1158/page/1

[Dani]

Thanks everybody!

[quinntopia]

The flexible stone walls from Chooch are the BEST!  I love the look and feel of these!  I wish these were around a couple of years ago when I was getting started!

Dani, I coulnd't quite make out the walls from the photo you posted, but they look a little similar to a technique I used.  These are basically brick/concrete sheets from Everygreen plastics with strips of styrene thrown in every couple of inches.  The benefit is that they are easy to work with, fairly inexpensive and pretty flexible: