A scenic break
Entry posted by wiggoforgold
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There's been a bit of a hiatus in work on the layout. At the end of last year, I suffered a detached retina. It's all been put back together now, but immediately after the event I couldn't see to do anything and then until my eyes stabilized there was a mismatch between the two which meant I couldn't do close work (this was brought home to me when I found I couldn't judge the distance to put the brush in the paint jar) So.. I started a lot of projects which still await the finishing touches, such as the bogie detailing on the EE type 3 (though this hasn't been helped by 46444 who accidently took the etch for the bogie steps home with him).
Anyway, at the back of Diddington station there's a gap where the scenery is unfinished. Filling the gap has been on my "to do" list for some time. It looked like this:
I've got a mental picture of what I want it to look like when it's finished. Work started by cutting a base the shape of the hole from a piece of a cardboard box. A vertical profile piece was fixed to the back using a hot glue gun, and formers giving the shape of the landform were fixed to this every 30mm or so.
The finished formers looked like this:
Srips of card about 5mm wide were glued to this to form a lattice, again using the hot glue gun. The card strips were cut from a cardboard "fridge pack" for coca cola, but any medium card, such as strips from a cereal packet would do. I did the longitudinals first, then added the short strips from front to back.
This is the finished lattice:
I then made a plaster covering for the lattice. I used squares of stiffish fabric about the size of a postage stamp, dipped in a mix of artex and pva and laid on the lattice. The fabric should be reasonably stiff - I used some dress stiffening material (I think it's called Buckram) because I had it to hand. I have also done it using squares of paper towel, dipped in a pva/water mix. The aim is to produce a hard, light shell. Once dry, I trimmed the fabric back where it hung over the lattice, and reinforced the ends with a coating of plastic wood, sanded down when dry. The piece now looked like this:
I had intended to build the whole piece and complete the scenery with it repmoved from the baseboard, but at this stage I decided it was better to fit it in place, whch would better allow me to blend it in to the baseboard and backscene. The section was glued in place with hot glue, and the gaps filled with an earth mix of artex, chinchilla dust, pva and brown acrylic paint (actually I mixed yellow red and blue as I was out of brown). The earth mix was painted all over the section, so it now looks like this:
Its now being left to dry for a few days before I complete the scenic covering, which will be mainly rough grass and bushes. I'll do another entry when the finishing stages are done.
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