Woodland Scenics makes excellent scenery products. They also make about 300 of them, and the catalog reads like it was written for people who already know what they want. For someone just starting out, there is almost no guidance on where to begin.

Here's the short version.

The only two things you need to start

Fine Turf is Woodland Scenics' ground cover material. It comes in a range of colors (burnt grass, green grass, earth, weeds, yellow grass) and it looks like finely ground, dried vegetation. It's more versatile than it looks. Mixing two or three colors together (burnt grass with a little earth mixed in, for instance) immediately makes your groundwork look less uniform and more realistic. Most experienced modelers end up buying several colors and blending them on the surface rather than using any single color straight from the bag.

Scenic Cement is what locks everything in place. It's essentially diluted white glue in a spray bottle, and you apply it over your ground materials after they're positioned. The key technique, and most beginners get this wrong, is to arrange everything first, then soak it with Scenic Cement, and leave it completely alone for at least 24 hours. Don't prod it. Don't check if it's drying. Just walk away. Come back the next day and it'll be set solid.

Those two products alone will carry you further than you'd expect.

What to add next

Clump Foliage is the next logical step. It's a fibrous material that mimics low shrubs and tree foliage, and it's easier to work with than it looks. Pulled into small irregular pieces and applied over a simple wire armature (or even just a twisted piece of wire from a hardware store), it makes convincing small trees and scrubby bushes. You can also press small pieces onto rocky surfaces to suggest vegetation growing in cracks and crevices. It's one of those small details that makes a bigger difference than you'd expect.

For water effects like ponds, streams, puddles, and flooded ground, Realistic Water is Woodland Scenics' pourable resin product. It dries clear, can be tinted with their pigments, and can be layered to add depth. One note of caution: pour it in thin layers rather than all at once. The product instructions say this clearly, and they mean it. Thick single pours can craze (develop fine surface cracks) as they cure. Two or three thin pours with drying time between them gives you a much better result.

What you probably don't need yet

Woodland Scenics' SubTerrain system is their foam-based approach to building terrain from scratch, and it's well-suited to large dedicated layouts. But if you're just getting started on a smaller project, you don't need it. Standard extruded foam insulation from a home improvement store does essentially the same job at significantly less cost. Save SubTerrain for when you're planning a full permanent layout.

The same goes for the full Earth Colors liquid pigment range. It's a useful product, but two or three turf colors mixed together combined with basic acrylic paints will get you through most beginner projects without it.

You don't need fancy tools

Nothing expensive is required. A cheap spray bottle (not the branded Woodland Scenics one; any dollar-store bottle works fine) for applying Scenic Cement, a large soft brush for placing materials, and an old kitchen sieve for spreading Fine Turf are the only tools worth having. The sieve is something experienced modelers use constantly and almost no beginner guide ever mentions. It gives you even, controlled coverage in a way that sprinkling by hand simply doesn't.

The thing that actually makes the difference

Woodland Scenics rewards patience more than almost any other hobby product line. The results you get from letting things fully cure and building up layers gradually are disproportionately better than rushing. There's a reason experienced hobbyists talk about 'Woodland Scenics magic.' It's that moment when a bare foam board suddenly looks like a real place. Getting there is mostly just a matter of not hurrying it.

Pick up Fine Turf in two or three colors, a bottle of Scenic Cement, and set aside a proper afternoon. The first time you come back the next morning to find your groundwork locked solid and looking like a real place rather than a model of one, you'll understand why people get obsessive about this. Just don't check on it while it's drying.