Entry posted by richbrummitt
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Aside from running out of ideas and being in desperate need of linking a lever frame with my TOUs so that I commence scenic work I have been slowly putting brick after brick individually in various walls.
I have a plan to produce my own brick paper 'kits' for the three station buildings (station building, signal box and weighbridge hut/goods office) on the computer using photographs of actual bricks arranged to proper bricklaying practices in as much as I understand them before printing them on sticky backed papers and wrapping them around a laser cut former. The latter so the sizes of the building and openings are more accurate than I can cut by hand. Fortunately drawings of the station building appear in the OPC line history and the signal box is a standard type that is covered in the Ericplans book. The weighbridge hut/goods office is similar enough to the one in this book to have just the West window changed for a smaller one, as indicated by pictures.
I began by getting frustrated wrestling with GIMP until I realised that a vector graphics program was what I required. I downloaded Inkscape and got moving reasonably quickly after digesting a few tutorials. It is quite tedious work and initially I wanted to get a feel for how long copying and placing individual bricks would take but things have progressed reasonably quickly and some re-use is possible. For example opposite sides can never be seen together so you only never need draw one side of the building before making allowances for the window openings. No-one would know that the bricks repeat unless they read this!
Thus far I have the weighbridge hut/goods office structure brickwork completed and have made a start on both the signal box and station buildings. The first step was to draw out a side and end. I drew these polygons with no border so that the line width does not need to be considered. I wasn't going to attempt to use the brick photographs as it was because of matching up the tile and patterning issues. I planned to use the bricks but not the mortar. I drew the mortar outlines in an off white colour as a series of rectangles. These brick outlines have no fill and the outline is a scale 3/8". I used four sizes - stretcher, header, queen closure, and a header plus stretcher for 'corner bricks'. When drawing these you need to consider the thickness of the mortar outline. The error is tiny but over the length of a building the error accumulates quickly. Inkscape allows snapping to the bounding box and to use the centre of the outline for the bounding box rather than outer edge of the line. This makes putting the 'bricks' together really easy. It is tedious though and at the moment there is only the mortar. Once I started drawing the bricks I found that I needed to adjust the sizes of the walls slightly to fit the bricks but these really are small alterations.
Once you have all the mortar drawn in it is time to add the texture. I cut out the individual bricks from a texture available freely on the internet that had a colouring that I liked. I used paint to do this and copied each brick into inkscape as a separate bitmap. Try to use just the bricks and not select too much mortar. Resize the brick textures to the size of stretchers, headers, &c. and then duplicate and add the bricks. Using the snaps align them to the mortar outlines and then place them on a layer behind the mortar.
Here's a crop of what it looks like
I've printed this out onto paper and built it up around a shell of mount board to get an idea for how this method will work.
and placed it in approximately the right position in the yard.
It requires the glazier and tiler to visit now.
I think this will work well and so am continuing to work on the other buildings. The bridge is taking some time because each brick also requires rotating to fit the arch. A lot of time will be saved painting things later though and I really quite like the effect. I must work on making the corners more square though.
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