Will Vale

Sorry I haven't been around as much as I should, I missed heaps of stuff on your blog but this is lovely as ever. You've done so much in a year in effectively a whole new medium. I think the railbus shot is amazingly real, and I like the last one for the way it shows the line weathered-in to the surroundings so effectively.

Lovely work Jon - very tidy finish and your colour choices are excellent.

Clearly I'm not very good at this Flickr link thing. I think (hope, pray) I've fixed the first one now too.

Looks like it would be a lot of fun to operate, and the intersecting curves on the harbour approach are really attractive. There are a couple of spots (around the roundhouse, along the top right) where you have vertical separation and quite a bit of track, do you think there's enough room for the retaining walls, banks, etc.?

Love the logos and weathering on those hoppers.

Thanks Mikkel, I'm pleased it came out well since it really was a "30 minutes the night before" kind of job. The MIG pigments are very good - they dry extremely matt and the way they clump and streak is just right.

OK, I think I've fixed all the photos now.

That crane is a work of art.

Thanks folks! I don't think I did actually - I was rushing towards the show deadline and didn't do as many updates as I should have. It's a bundle of wires twisted together for the branches, then painted with matte medium and dipped in/sprinkled a mixture of static grass and shreds cut off a plastic Christmas wreath. (They're flat matt green plastic strips supposed to look like pine needles, and have a bit more of a leafy texture than scatter). For the flower heads I left the last bit of wire without foliage, and when the green bit was dry glued and dipped that in purple flock. From what I recall the only really tricky bit was handling the plastic "leaf" shreds - they were ridiculously static and jumped like fleas. Thanks for the pointer James - I'm guessing that might be John Robinson? I've seen some of his rolling stock but not the layout. Was brave of them to try and take a photo longways - I've tended to chicken out although I'm going to have another go with stacked focus soon. I think it's because I updated a couple of them - the one that didn't link for me was the tractor at the bottom which should now be fixed. Let me know if you still have any problems.

(click pictures for big versions) I spent time on Whitemarsh last week so that I could enter in the NZAMRC 2012 Convention competition. I opted to just take the bridge end - nothing's been done to the other module which is definitely lagging behind now My main aim was to try and fill in various unfinished or messy-looking areas. The worst offenders were the last-minute patches of grass I added before Railex in 2010 which were applied straight over the ballast, and didn't have any "reinforcement" from earth or weeds. They looked a bit odd as a result, so I've been sprinkling on various mixtures of scenic fluff to fill in around the grass, and tamping it down with a dry brush before wetting and applying matt medium. I also pulled up some of the grass and thinned it out near the bridge. You can see the results around the buffer stop and ballast/grass edges which I think look a bit more "faired in" than they did. I also replaced the (prototypical, but odd-looking) single Rosebay Willowherb between the two lines with some more subtle weeds: Another job was finishing off painting the concrete trunking. Once that was done I added some shadows on the ballast with a dark wash (not everywhere, but patchily) to define this a bit better. Also on the concrete front, I nicked the four lamps I made for the other end of the layout and added some new pads for them to sit on. They aren't wired up yet, and I need to get some more brass tube to make proper sockets for them, but they look nice and help reinforce the connection between layout and prototype. I noticed (only after a while...) that the neat alcohol I use for wetting the fine textures had faded the paint on the bridge girder, which was a bit annoying. Luckily it wasn't hard to recover it by drybrushing with the original colour, keeping a little bit of the faded paint in places for variety. On the other side of the girder I've painted some details on the footpath and weathered the road. Lastly I filled in the empty spot with a rusted Little Grey Fergie (TE20) since we used to see them around when I was growing up in the fens. The weathering job is very simple and comprised three steps - Dullcote, MIG washes, and MIG pigments. It's not subtle but I think it does the job OK. I also removed the overscale steering wheel. I'm afraid these pictures look rather strong and punchy, and the white balance is off in a couple. I think that my colour calibration isn't set up properly somewhere since they look more subtle in Lightroom. I'll try and sort that out before doing too much more. I've also done some quickie experiments with focus stacking, which is cool but tricky to get right, so I don't have anything to show yet.

That's a good point about the low forces involved. I'll have a try with 0.3mm brass wire and see if that works. The problem is that as well as the contact wire I'll then need to solder up catenery spans... It probably won't be for a while, but I'll post here if I get something working. Thanks again!

Looks really nice. I love the oily sheen and the contrast between the plain rail and pointwork.

Thanks again guys. @Mikkel, I'm glad you liked the seatbelts, it was my first experience with them and they are pretty fiddly. I've found Tamiya's gel superglue to be really useful, I don't think I could have done it with any of the others I've used. The nice thing is that once together, it takes very little effort to weather them since the printing is a good base. I'm sure you're right about the cross-fertilisation, and sometimes it's just that a break or a variation in what you do is good at keeping the motivation levels up. I admire your single-mindedness vis-a-vis Farthing though. I think my favourite of the "ZOMG small!" pictures is still this one though:

Thanks James, it was nice to get it out agan, not so nice cleaning the track but the scenery seems fine The galvanised look is similar to what I did on the lamp posts, although those had bigger "flakes" (I ended up reading about how it works in reality last time - it's pretty interesting); The boxes and base were sprayed with grey primer (Plastikote lacquer) and then I sort of scrubbed Tamiya flat aluminium into the surface with a stiff brush and cotton bud, using the goopy stuff from the bottom of the jar. Once that had dried I went over it with blotches of Citadel Boltgun Metal and a drybrush of neat white. The wash is an enamel from MIG, as recommended by Invercloy. It's great stuff.

Relay boxes by Will Vale, on Flickr ...have been greatly exaggerated. I have been modelling in my spare time, just not railway modelling, so I'm doing better than last year at least... But I have done something train-related today - I dug Whitemarsh out of the cupboard and finished painting all the cable trunking which had only had a base coat of cream paint until now. I'm trying to get the bridge end of the layout ready to take to the NZAMRC convention at the end of the week, so of course I left it until Tuesday to start. D'oh. As you can see above, I made up a couple of Wills (my!) relay boxes and set them on a styrene plinth which has been painted to look like concrete. The paint job on the boxes was an experiment which I think sort of worked - they look nicely galvanised, but the paint looks gritty and coarse which isn't really in scale. I also added a pin wash around the details which looks quite stark in close-up but helps them "read" properly from a distance. These are going to be planted at the back of the layout tomorrow to fill in a little gap which has been bothering me. I've cut a space but I need to fill in around them still. I'm quite pleased with the padlock, which is seriously small (under 1mm square, 0.6mm deep, with 0.3mm wire for the shackle) but annoyed that I got a glue blob on the surface while sticking it on!