It's coming together...

There has been a good deal of progress with the layout this week, lots of different tasks on the go. The roofs of the buildings have been primed and painted, here they are seen mid-way through painting. The felt roof of the engine shed had grey primer, then a coat of darker grey/black, followed by grey weathering powder. The corrugated iron roof of the tipper shed had red primer, a couple of washes of rusty brown, then a thin wash of black, with brown weathering powders. I'm aiming for an asbestos roof for the low-relief shed, so started with grey primer, then splattered black paint over (the can was running out which helped), a couple of thin washes of grey and more weathering power, the result is looking OK.

 

All the concrete walls have had a dusting of weathering powder, emphasising the texture and giving a variation in tone. This was followed by a coat of Testors Dullcote matt varnish to protect them, and remove any sheen from the printed paper. The backscene also had a coat of the matt stuff. Now finally the footpath walls could be fixed in place, and the bridge too!

The track has seen more paint, the rails and metal sleepers touched in with rust brown and the sleepers in grey. This was much easier thanks to the earlier spray paint job, though took much longer, but I think the result is much better.

 

Next up came the ground contours, carved from pieces of polystyrene foam. There isn't much open ground, but the job was somewhat fiddly, filling all the awkward gaps between the buildings and the edges of the board. While I was at it I made up a staircase from track level towards the sand hoppers, using offcuts of foam core board covered in a printout of concrete from the cgtextures website.

 

The polystyrene was then covered in a "gloop" made up of plaster (filler), powder paint, and a dollop of PVA glue. This is painted on with layers of strips of newspaper to make a brown shell.

 

As these last couple of photos show the result of these steps has quite a dramatic effect. There's still some way to go, but for the first time it feels like the scene is really coming together.