I just added 15 new photos of our layout to my Photobucket site. Click on link below to see them all. Not many of them are gems. Here are a few of my favorites.
Fantastic work Jim,
I really like your roadways, how do you make them? Nice work putting dirt/tire marks coming from the farm. One thing that I picked up from the tips and tricks book is that you can take the screws that you use for your roadbead track holding screws is to partially screw them into a small piece of wood and then spray paint them all at once with a paint the color of the roadbed, this should make them dissapear in your layout.
Great work.
dennis
You guys are really doing a lot to cheer up a down-in-the-dumps fellow (me). Thank you all so much for the nice remarks.
The pine trees in these photos are all made from furnace filter material. Some have real tree branches for trunks, while others have wooden meat scewers. I think the newer trees look more realistic than my first attempts. I started sprinkling on some course ground foam to the newer trees before painting them. It makes a huge difference. The foam goes on thick, and looks like too much was applied, but the paint shrinks it nicely. I use cheap hairspray to make the foam stick to the trees.
The road is just the painted surface of the foam panels. I mixed up a batch of medium to light gray and slapped it down. I don’t know if you can see it, but I continued the road onto the backdrop (ala the roadrunner and coyote). I penciled in road cracks with an ordinary no. 2 pencil. The dirt marks coming out of the farm are just made with brown paint.
The playhouses are 2 small Plasticeville hobo shacks. Painting and dry brushing really brings out a lot of molded in detail. I plastered circus posters all over both shacks, figuring kids would do that type of thing. They could still use more kid-oriented detailing. Eventually I’ll find some figures of boys and a girl for them, but right now, a pony-sized black lab rules the roost there.
Oh, I scratchbuilt the little boy in the last photo with the help of my wife. We made 2 identical, but I’m not going to divulge how we did that! [;)]
You are truly gifted. I love your landscaping and your attention to detail (like the dirt car tracks coming out onto the asphalt road). I do have a question. As realistic and detailed as your layout is, why fastrack? Why not a railed track with ballast?
