Westlake Publishing Forums

Hi Volker.
Great to see your posts again and of course, the display looks great.
Maybe in March, you will have another chance to show it all again.?

All the best Kim.

Thank you for this photos.
Your work is really fantastic !

Very Nice - great detail
Barney

Volker

This thread is among the ones i visited through the years while not being a member.
I never could keep looking for more than a couple of minutes because your work made me very nervous.
Your work with the paving of the street and the embedded track is simply amazing.
I have now seen the 'little' Decauville at the last page and now i couldn't avoid giving the whole thread a serious reading.

The only comment i can leave now is:

DSC02509 by d.caso, on Flickr



Daniel

Awesome!

A happy new year to everyone out there - health, peace and liability for mankind's future.

During the Corona summer 2021 we went out a lot for hiking. It was back then at one of our trips when I found this woodpile out in the woods. Aside of its appealing vanitas appeareance I was fascinated of the 'story' behind that thing. What might have happended that someone cuts all that would, piles it up and then abandons it for decay?




I started with some cut-to length limbs which I had collected over the years. They were completely dry and the bark had begun to part. I glued the pieces with CA to each other.




A layer of greenish-yellowish watercolor mixed with opaque white served to achieve the look of the coating algae.




The deep traces of decay in the upper logs were made with a flambé torch. I fixed the delicate result with thinned latex binder, which seems to be milky blu when wet, but dries up colorless.






Some brown and red water color toned the burnt areas. Fine turf in different colors builds up moss on the logs.



I added strips of tea to fill up the gaps between the logs with an imitation of decomposed wood. And well, this is my interpretation of the pile, which surely will find a niche at one of the segments:








All in all the book project prevented intense modeling, and I took the sparse available time to tinker aroud with imitating vegetation, especially trees. I still didn't find the holy grail so don't expect to much. There was something wrong with my first attempt, that I've shown at some of the Plettenberg exhibition pictures.




Especially the lateral view shows that the foliage is to blotchy.




Not willing to spend weeks twisting thousands of wires I was looking for a 'faster' method and found this spawn floss at an aquaristics shop.




I glued shreds of it to a tree made out of some rather coarse wires ...




... and used Heki "Realisktik Laub" for the leafes. It doesn't convince in a macro photo, but from a distance theres the typical appearance of diaphanus foliage.









I think this method works well for smaller gauges up to O-scale, but for the bigger ones I'm still looking for a better method and substrate.

Cheers,
Volker

Silly me; I think the original tree looks quite good. The new tree looks good, too. I love the woodpile. Happy New Year. -- Russ

HI Volker.
Have a great Year all the best to your family.
Cheers Kim

The tree looks great, but I really love the wood pile.

Hi Volker,

how did you shrink the fern on the wood pile?

Cheers, Uwe

I didn't. It is that small. It is a kind of moss (Hylocomium splendens) that I dried, drenched with a mixture of spirit and glycerin, dried again and then colored with some acrylics. The "branches" need to be rearranged because the moss doesn't have that fern-like bearing 'as is'.

That woodpile is brilliant!
So realistic. What is the scale?
I'd like to see a figure next to it for scale.
Carlo

Thanks, Carlo, it is 1-22.5 scale like all my other work, too.

Carlo, usually I don't use figures at all, but here we go; even added my last cent:



[/quote]

Quote from: 1-32 on January 02, 2023, 03:38:13 PMHI Volker.
Have a great Year all the best to your family.
Cheers Kim
[...] Maybe in March, you will have another chance to show it all again.?

Kim,
thank you very much. All the best for you, too. I'm not sure if I will make it to Utrecht this year as an exhibitor. If so I'll show the Lohmann building as work in progress - mo trains involved. But I'm planning to join the show in 2024 or 2025, when (or if?) 'the acid years' project is finished. Will you be in Utrecht this year?

Quote from: Sami on September 13, 2022, 11:38:18 AMThank you for this photos.
Your work is really fantastic !

Sami, thank you very much. You'd have to see it in the flesh, both the modeling and the pictures.

Quote from: Barney on September 13, 2022, 01:17:01 PMVery Nice - great detail
Barney

Barney, kind words from the master of details!

Quote from: Daniel on September 13, 2022, 10:27:43 PMVolker

This thread is among the ones i visited through the years while not being a member.
I never could keep looking for more than a couple of minutes because your work made me very nervous.
Your work with the paving of the street and the embedded track is simply amazing.
I have now seen the 'little' Decauville at the last page and now i couldn't avoid giving the whole thread a serious reading.

Daniel

Daniel, thank you. You semm to have been absent for a while?

Quote from: Ray Dunakin on September 13, 2022, 10:55:50 PMAwesome!

Ray, thank you. Very nice to notice that you're fine again.

Volker

Thanks!