Jaakko's Blog

Hi, I think your shade is about right (in the photos anyway). Whilst the surface shouldn't be too rough, there should be some potholes and crumbling areas at the edges. How wide is the road? Whilst you can go out and measure them, I always find they look too wide at scale width (mine do!!). Cheers.

 

Tony

Looks good to me Jaako. Down the centre line of the road a small growth of weeds or possibly a slightly darker grey shading/weathering to show where loose chippings/dirt has collected could be an option. The walls and grass look good, the terrain has a lovely flow to it.

The weeds/chippings centre line tends to be more where it is a single track road or track(!). My guess here, would be a road wide enough for two vehicle to pass quite comfortably (I might be wrong). You might get two slight chipping collections on the centre of each side...

Ah good point Tony, I interpreted the scale wrong there a little!

The scene put a smile on my face for one simple reason... it looks like a sunny summers' day, I am currently daydreaming about riding a bicylcle down the hill.

 

Nice

Thanks for your nice words Will J. I suppose, however, that a sunny summer day is quite a rare weather condition in Wales. How much more convincing a layout featuring a dull rainy day would be?

Thanks for your kind comments chaps! It is nice to know that some of you are reading my blog.
 
I made the road on a general feeling basis and that is why it perhaps is too wide, about six centimeters (equals about fifteen scale feet in 4mm scale). In the country side roads would typically be twelve feet wide (equals about five centimeters). In remote areas

do not make the same mistake twice (instead of that, try to do new mistakes

Really like this, Jaakko. In fact, the second photo looks kind of wintery, as if snow is covering the fields!

 

For a really smooth, tarmac type road surface, I'd suggest that you just lay the road surface with the Polyfilla type material first, and give it a good sanding to get it smooth, before even adding the dry stone walls etc.

 

Alternatively, you could do worse than trying a decent quality thick card, such as Dalerboard, laid and glued to a series of supporting card formers, as your road surface, which could then just be painted with enamels or the paints of your choice (in such circumstances, I prefer to avoid water-based paints, when painting card).