Sunday 27 November 2016

In the background.

My hope for an easy week filled with lots of 15 minutes failed dismally this week. I'll ramble on about the stuff that I have learned later. However, a couple of 14 hour days and urgent changes to reports made the work week longer than I thought.

Monday's time was spent painting benches for the fish shop brown. That was job number one from the previous post.

Tuesday's 15 minutes was spent painting the fish and chip kiosk blue. 


I bet you all wish that you had such awesome painting skills huh? Job two done? I don't think so. It wasn't the colour that I had envisaged but I had run out of my Floquil light blue and I can't buy that again. Humbrol was the next choice.

That was pretty much it for the week. Thank goodness for a quiet weekend. Here's the blue that I was thinking of for the kiosk. By the way, the fence was glued in place with Mod Podge on Saturday morning.


After a trip to the hobbyshop here are the blues that I finished with.


The two tins on the left were new on Saturday morning. The left tin went straight into the airbrush as it was really thin. The middle tin, which was to be my base colour, was gluggy as gluggy can be and required a 1:1 paint to thinner mix. The tin on the right had already been thinned. Here is the result.


Job two done.

I turned my attention to the back scene. I tried a couple of painting studies again but they didn't look that good. Another alternative is to use photos. It was a good afternoon on Saturday so I hopped in the car with the camera and headed to the nearby national park picnic area and created a panorama photo. A quick tutorial in Youtube and I was able to produce part of that back scene.



It is printed on plain copy paper. I have darkened the image a little bit and I am working on making the image to be printed in sections onto A3 paper as I have access to an A3 printer. I could get it printed to size but the cost may be a bit prohibitive. What you can't see as it is covered by the fence is the boat on the water. I reckoned that water in the foreground was the best way to put distance between me and the hill that I was photographing.

Other things to consider may be to try and create some depth between fences and the back scene. I have moved the dairy fence a bit and poked a tree behind it. I carved up an old Athern container to put behind the fence. I also thought of stacking a pile of oil drums between the oil depot fence and the back scene. eBay and an Australian seller provided me with lots of Kibri oil drums really quickly. Recently I have developed the belief that kits should be painted to loose the plastic sheen. In this case the sheen will be covered by the painted plastic fence. I was thinking about a third layer of drums but I think that two layers are not WHS approved. They are just a stack of empty drums waiting to be filled and then shipped off by rail. The fence was modified but has not been glued in place yet.


Just poking out from the left of the frame is a tree which I made - sort of. Years ago I bought a set of Hornby tree kits from as toy store on the coast. They were cheap as the shop was getting rid of its model railway stock. I still have most of the trees. A couple I put together, one I broke trying to bend it and the rest I left. They are very two dimensional. Perfect for what I want here. There should be another, smaller tree going in on the other side of the dairy. A bit of Mod Podge, Woodlands Scenic under brush foam and some store brand hairspray and the job is done.

Plans for this week?

1. Print and glue the back scene.
2. Make a sign and menus for the fish and chip kiosk.
3. Add some greenery around the marina.
4. Pain the oars for the row boats.
5. Put the windows in the boats I put together last weekend. This will be an achievement but not a noticeable one.
6. Start modifying the oil depot building.

Here are some other pictures of the layout so far.




Until next time (which will hopefully be tomorrow).

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