A Start

This is my first blog in the model making world, I thought I'd make a start...

My first foray into the world of scratch building was to make a medium sized station building to go on my ficticious semi-rural model railway. This is the "as finished as it's going to get" model as I'd divested quite a lot of time in it, but decided it wasn't quite good enough...

The structure of this model was based upon the medium station building produced by scalescenes. I looked at the dimensions and then drew up my own version in adobe Illustrator, then printing the elevations on to self adhesive paper before sticking them on to 3mm foamex. Then with a scalpel, the individual sections were cut out and the building shell assembled.

Where I work during the day, I have access to a large format printer that prints really good quality on to banner grade inket material, so I thought I'd give printing out some Scalescenes Ashlar Stone a try on an offcut of the thinnest stuff we had. The output was fantastic, if a little greener than I'd have liked, but the material was way too thick to fold around the edges, so I decided to compromise and live with the exposed white edges. After outputting the stone texture, I then stuck double sided tape to the rear of  print, then applied the faces of the building to the adhesive, carefully cutting out the edges and apertures. Using this method resulted in a servicable model, if a little too rough around the edges.

To be frank, after spending quite some time individually glueing on strips of printed roof tiles, I'd got a bit fed up with it. It sat unfinished with half the roof still to go on the booking office building on a bench until I decided to finish off the roof and see how it looked on the platform I'd built.

And there it  sat on my platform in the garage, still missing the windows on the opposite side the picture above for a good few months, before being inspired by the fabulously talented model-maker Iain Robinson, I decided to have a go using the DAS clay method of making stone walls, which I will talk about in the next post...