Suitable software for creating interior wall artwork

[GJChurchward]

This is my first post in this forum.  I did some Superquick modelling many years ago, but I'm considering myself a relative newbie in card modelling, having seen some of the great models made by people in this forum.

 

I bought a couple of Metcalfe kits for OO/HO.  I have their wayside station and station shelter.  They were originally intended as a rapid and economical means to upgrade my two young boys' model train setup, which is rapidly merging with my own modelling interests.  They've expressed an interest in having interior lighting (easy enough) and therefore I think there has to be some basic representation of interior wall detail.  The bare grey card would otherwise stick out like a sore thumb when the lights are on.

 

I'm starting with the station shelter, since it's the smaller building, and if I make a complete mess of it I'll have lost a smaller investment of effort.  I've gone round the inside of the two main rooms, filling the gaps between tabs and window/door frames with grey card infills, and I've prepared another layer of grey card to fit inside these, with just the window apertures cut out.  The final wall thickness will therefore be about the same as three layers of grey card.  Before fitting the inner layer, I want to print some interior detail overlays using my colour printer.

 

I'm very sure some of you will have done something similar in the past, and I wonder if you can recommend a suitable graphics package?  So far I've looked at DrawPlus and Blender.  Both appear to provide a lot of functionality I don't need, but have a long learning curve before I can do anything simple with them.  Freeware is obviously attractive.  Do you just use Windows Paint?

[monkeysarefun]

Inkscape is free -  its mainly meant for vector graphics but you can import .bmp .jpeg etc into it and resize them and print if that is the limit of what you intend to do. For a more image pertinent package, there is gimp which is also free and adds image editing capabilities.

[katwigan]

You could also utilise some of the interior detail sections of several of the "downloadable and printable ' kits from the likes of Scalescenes, Clever or Smart Models etc.

Kevan

[brossard]

Agree with Kevan, I've been using Scalescenes a lot.  The kits are not expensive and include a lot of useful details, like interiors.

 

https://scalescenes.com/

 

John W's artwork is excellent.

 

John

[Campaman]

The drawing program that is included with LibreOffice can do what you want very easily and is free and you also get a Word Processor & Spreadsheet in the download.

[Phil Howe]

One option is to use pre-printed craft papers.  I have been known to raid SWMBO's stash if I see one that looks like a suitable wallpaper pattern. The patterns are most often much too large to use but, every now and then, one is just right.

 

I always have a riffle through the pads when I'm in The Range, where they are cheapest: https://www.therange.co.uk/arts-and-crafts/papercraft/card-paper-and-foam/paper/simply-creative-fiesta-fun-paper-pad/#176489

 

Cheers

 

Phil

[Campaman]

You could also use pictures of real interiors scaled down to suit, plenty on Rightmove :-)

[14Steve14]

There are loads of free graphics programs. I use paint.net or Gimp, for a lot of stuff as they are not as complicated as photoshop. Its easy to resize images in both packages so you can print to a scale size. If you want to get really clever you can draw your wall to scale in sketchup, then add in images =for things like pictures and doors, then print from full size to a specified scale. Its not as hard to learn as it is to say it. Try to get an older version as the latest ones are al online now I believe.

[Pacific231G]

Wallpaper has a repetitive pattern so using Corel Paint Shop Pro (PSP- other graphic packages are available)  I've found it fairly easy to take samples of real wallpaper (and flooring) and then copy and paste them onto a larger canvas to produce a large enough size. It's quite satisfying to know that you're using authentic patterns from the period you're modelling. With wallpaper you can use the trick of exponential expansion so that if the sample only includes one example of the pattern both horizontal and vertical you can double it then double that again and so on to make whatever size you need.

 

The trick I didn't figure out until after I'd produced the wallpaper for the upstairs apartment in a fairly recent  building was to insert into the wallpaper appropriate framed pictures  so ended up laboriously gluing separate pictures onto the walls. I won't do that again and the same trick allows rugs and non-fitted carpets to be added to a room's floor before printing.

 

In both cases you do need to keep on top of the actual size so that when you come to print it you can set the print size appropriately to the scale you're modelling in.

 

For planked flooring I've just used a sample from a flooring company and duplicated that but, unlike wallpaper which is meant to repeat every few inches, simply doubling and redoubling sections of planking gives some very obviously inauthentic patterning. It takes a bit more work with judicious mirroring and inverting of copied sections and some randomness in pasting of each section to avoid that. 

 

I used to use a free version of PSP with Windows XP but that doesn't work with Windows 7 so I've now bitten the bullet and bought the package for my current machine. That has provided some very useful new features including some easy to use straightening and perspective correction tools that are proving very useful when using pictures taken from an angle (mostly of enamelled advertising signs)

 

The interiors suppled with kits often seem very crude but for simple interiors you can also use photos of the real thing. The Café de la Gare on the layout I'm currently working up has a bar taken from a photo I took of a real French bar with the front of the bar itself brought forward from the array of bottles and glasses behind on a block; because you can only see the interior through one window the flatness doesn't matter. The only problem I had was that, though the patron had been quite happy for me to photograph his bar, I simply couldn't get a model release from the resident tabby who had no intention of moving off the bar where he was sleeping so had to be edited out.  To be honest I added far more detail than I needed in 1:87 scale but it was fun to do.

Edited September 22, 2018 by Pacific231G

[Robin2]

The drawing program that is included with LibreOffice can do what you want very easily and is free and you also get a Word Processor & Spreadsheet in the download.

+1

 

...R