Rock Staining

I knew that I had to try my hand at staining the rock castings. Bruce and I had done some work before on the hill between Uniontown and Herminie. I wanted to highlight the clay composition found in Pennsylvania soil, so I was going for more orange than brown. As you can see in the first photo, I got it a little too orange.

Rocks a little too orange on the Herminie hillside

Since then I read a few articles that implied it was both easy and only too a little experimenting to get museum quality rocks and hillsides. Yeah, I was not buying that...but I was OK with close enough. I bought the Woodland Scenics Earth Colors Kit C1215 a couple of months ago and the instructions were brief and made no sense to me. So naturally, I ignore them and tried it my way.
I put a couple of drops (why don't they make these in squeeze bottles?) of Burnt Umber, added a drop or two of Yellow Ocher and a few drops of water, stirred and slapped it on. Well, I brushed it, stippled it, dabbed...all kinds of techniques. I didn't like the color so I mixed some Stone Gray and Burnt Umber and it was OK but still not what I wanted. I tried three other color combinations, then ended up with my rubbing alcohol and black ink wash.
I stepped back and thought....well, that didn't work out as planned! I took a couple of pictures for the story today and looking closer, I sort of like what I see. I need to fix the ballast, add some ground cover, bushes and of course get the backdrop painted, but I think this might work.

Second attempt using Woodland Scenics Earth Colors Kit

Of course, I realized at this point that I did not measure any of the paint mixtures I created, am not really sure I know which paints (there are 8 in the kit) that I ended up mixing together and since I kept painting over the castings with different paints and techniques, I am not even sure if the final product is a single paint mixture or the result mixing the different paint samples.
Plan? We don't need no stinkin' plan!