Quiet earth (was: Exercise module for Plettenberg railroad in 1/22.5 scale)

[Barney]

Such detailed landscaping - a thing not often seen
Barney

[Hydrostat]

Greetings from Wiesenthal stop:

















Cheers,
Volker

[finescalerr]

Impossible to tell from 1:1 scale. Superb. -- Russ

[Barney]

Very realistic -inspiring work
Barney

[Bill Gill]

Excellent. The colors are especially good!

[Les Tindall]

Absolutely amazing!
Les

[Ray Dunakin]

Stunning! Great work!

[Bernhard]

Volker, this really is modelling at its finest.
Bernhard

[1-32]

Hi Volker.
Love the plywood signboard with the worn signs,
cheers

[Hydrostat]

Lately the brass parts for the switch lever arrived. Shapeways had some weeks, um, months delay in making cast metal parts. The brass parts were tinned, burnished and then painted with some diluted matte black Revell oil colors, then pigments applied to the humid color and afterwards an additional wash with real rust. First time I managed to have the switch weight showing the correct positions of the white semicircle in both switch positions.








This lever has an a little bit different design compared to german standard levers.



(snippet; Wolf Dietrich Groote collection)


Cheers,
Volker

[finescalerr]

Volker, please don't try to fool us. That is not a model. -- Russ

[Ray Dunakin]

Very nice!

[Hauk]

Greetings from Wiesenthal stop:

















Cheers,
Volker

Fantastic work. Have you described your concrete and tarpaper techniques earlier in the thread?

[Bill Gill]

Completely believable.

[Hydrostat]

Russ, Ray, Hauk, Bill,
thank you.

Have you described your concrete and tarpaper techniques earlier in the thread?

No, I didn't - thanks for asking!

Here we go:
I tried some materials for the tarpaper like sandpaper or handkerchiefs but nothing worked for me: the first being to stiff (even after an hour of boiling it in water), the other with a lack of texture and so I made my own tarpaper. Base is a blotting paper sheet from an exercise book. Some strong permanent spray mount serves to fix silicon carbide, not sure which exact grid it was, maybe F 150. Once dried I used some lightly diluted black acrylic color to paint it from both sides. I found that color in a supermarket sale for 1,- €. It smells a bit like gasoil (yes, it does  ). Then I'd cut the sheet to strips and take some diluted PVA to mount them to the roof. If you don't want folds/wrinkles you need to moisten the strips' back side beforehand. If you want the wrinkles go straight ahead: the strips start to wrinkle as soon as they get in touch with the diluted PVA. There's some time to correct it a bit if the effect is to strong. I didn't apply glue to the overlap and so later on I glued it with that undiluted black acrylic, mixed with some PVA for strength, to the lower strip, squeezing out the color a bit from the overlap - just as it is with tar mounted tarpaper roofs. It takes some time to adhere (My conclusion is that misleading modeling takes the same time as building the real thing, which makes it obscene in some viewers' eyes). There's a layer of planks under the tarpaper and the blotting paper aligns perfectly and that clean, that you can see the board gaps depending on incidence of light.





Plaster:
First step is to glue bricks to the areas, where they are going to be visible later on, and to grout them. First layer is a mixture of melaphyre dust, a bit yellow clay dust found in the woods, diluted PVA and some pigments, applied with a spatula.








Once dried there's a second layer of clay dust with just a bit of very fine melaphyre powder (30 years ago I took two buckets of dust home from a quarry, occasionally sifting it out to different grids. Seems to be enough for a lifetime).





The clay tends to form cracks during drying. I applied several thin layers until cracks seemed believable to me.





Next step was blending bricks and plaster by some extremely thinned clay plaster.





Last steps were sanding the surface to get rid of a few bigger grits and unevenness from working with the spatula and then applying several washes of blackish/brownish/yellowish gouache.





Cheers,
Volker