Stone wall test

I wanted to model a stone wall, with moss and lichen. I could think of a number of ways of doing this, and buying a ready-made casting was not one of them. What I could do was to for instance:

• Do a simple plaster casting and scribe a stone pattern on to it
• Scribe or imprint a stone pattern in a piece of extruded foam
• Build the wall from individual stones

I've done the first two in other (N scale) projects so I settled for the last one. Might (perhaps) be doable in O scale, which as you know is the scale for my current layout.

First I got myself a bunch of O scale stones. I made them from a flake of not yet cured plaster which I first scribed and broke into strips. The strips where then cut up into more or less rectangular stones. Like this:

I then built a support structure from styrene...

...on which I then stacked the stones and secured them with ordinary white glue. I applied the glue in the back, towards the support only, since I did not want any glue on the visible parts of the stones. Any glue on the stones would ruin any later staining. Here four rows of stones are in place:

And finally we are done:

I admit, the resulting surface is a little on the uneven and rough side. A real stone layer, working with cut stones, and producing a result like this would most probably have got sacked! But for a first test I think it came out quite nice. 

Here is a shot with the wall on the layout. The height of the wall is about 1.5 scale meters (a little less than 5 feet).

Next up is staining and painting, followed by the application of lichen and moss.