I started using Woodland Scenics flock around 1987 to bring a little more spark to my modular game terrain for 6mm micro armor. About half of that first batch of terrain is still in use (some of it was damaged in a move in 1995), as is a large amount of terrain that I made in 1989 with 15mm gaming in mind.
I've added terrain almost every year since 1987 and now have modular terrain for eight settings, both multi-scale and scale specific pieces, for use with 6 to 28mm figs. Over 700 square feet of it in all, sits on and under my table, and on shelves all over the basement. And, all of it is covered with Woodland Scenics flock.
Over the years, I've used just a couple of bags/bottles of flock from other manufacturers, when colors not made by WS were needed. The primary reason that I stayed with WS was availability and ability to match new terrain to old.
In recent years, you may have noticed some variation in the color of terrain tiles depicted on my blog. The first time I really noticed the variation in WS color batches was in the mid 1990s, just subtle variations then, though more dramatic in recent years.
I use a custom mix for my primary yellow terrain, and for my jungle terrain. The primary color for my green terrain is the WS Grass Blend. When applying flock, I first apply other shades to contrast high and low spots and to just create some variation in general. The last step is to apply the primary color, which covers the overwhelming majority of the completed tile.
More recently, a shift in the WS Grass Blend has been more of an issue, and will lead to my re-flocking somewhere around 250 square feet of green terrain. The start of this process took place a few weeks back, when I made a point to consolidate containers of flock, and make sure that everything was dated or labelled to make matching new batches as easy as possible in the future.
During that process, I took a few pics of the flock from various WS batches over the years to compare.
First up is the WS Light Yellow fine flock:
The bottle on the left dates to 2019, the middle to some time prior to 2017, and the bottle on the right is from a bag that dates to the mid 1990s. As time progresssed, the light yellow got darker, more brown, then lightened up a little.
Next is the Earth Blend:
The leftmost bottle dates to January 2019, the second was purchased in 2017, and third is from somewhere between 2016 and 2010, and the one on the right is from a bag dating to 1998. particularly noticeable on the finished tiles is that the newer blend has a more dramatic contrast between the lightest and darkest particles, which is most obvious between the second and last bottles above.
The Grass Blend has seen the most notable change:
In recent years the green Grass Blend has shifted to being darker and greener, less yellow than in years past. I don't have any older grass blend on hand but can show the difference in the tiles. The top left tile dates to 2022, the top right to 1989 and the bottom to roughly 1997.
Some other colors have changed over the years as well. Last year, I contacted Woodland Scenics to try to figure out what the fine light green grass that I had used for decades might have been, as I could not find an equivalent on the WS site. I had finally used up my container of light green that dated to 1988 or earlier. The material had originally come in bags, which had been loaded into the old round "scenic spreaders" decades ago.
As it turned out, they informed me that they never offered a fine light green, and as the material was definitely a WS product (I was unfamiliar with any other brand until some time in the 1990s), I concluded that it was most probably a light batch of Burnt Grass that I had used all of these years.
This lead to a search for a new light green, which ended up coming in the form of Scenic Express Fine Light Green flock. It had a more coarse texture than the WS product, so I sifted it out and used the really fine particles in making my "West German" terrain last year. It worked out okay, though is a little brighter than I'd like, particularly in contrast to the now darker WS Grass Blend.
In any event, I figured that I'd share my observations on the chance that they might be useful some how.
Dating the containers is a good idea! (I’ve had similar shifts in long familiar paints over the decades.) GW Grass is my go to basic as well. Do you think it’s a change in the formula or perhaps a result of aging/atmospheric exposure? (I haven’t noticed any color shift in bases from the 90s that I sealed with a watered down mix of Matt medium. Might have to compare them to the remands of that container.) ~ Tom T
ReplyDeleteI'm guessing that they haven't changed the formula, so much as maybe suppliers of the coloring agents have come and gone over the years. Or maybe those suppliers simply have a wide tolerance for variation in their batches of product. Could be to that the foam material has changed over the years (change in chemicals/regulations maybe), and takes the coloring a little differently.
DeleteIt is interesting that you haven't noticed changes on the your figure bases. Maybe it is simply a luck of the draw kind of thing and some batches are more similar to older ones, and others less so.
I do suspect that there is some fading to my terrain tiles, though wouldn't suspect it to be too great, as they are never in the sun, and are only exposed to light for a few hours during a game.