Curling

Now I know that curling is traditionally played with large chunks of granite but I've been having fun with my DAS clay cobbles curling all on their own. The problem occurred when I started work on another layout experiment to see how the approach I had settled on for making and painting cobbles worked over a larger area. I used a piece of foam board as the base and made the mistake of assuming it was rigid enough not to curl as the modelling clay dried. It wasn't. Fortunately it wasn't the end of the world; I used a sharp knife to remove a small sliver from the bottom cardboard layer of the foam board allowing me to bend the board enough to remove the curl and so the board would sit flat.

With this experiment I went a little further than just modelling cobblestones though, as you can see from this photo of the Meridian Models kit I recently completed.

I thought I'd take the opportunity to make a start on figuring out how I'm going to construct at least some of the buildings on the layout, and to turn the cobblestones into more of a photographic plank where I can pose the rolling stock as it is built.

I'm not going to go into any details on how I put the building together as it really isn't worth the telling (it's an embarrassing mix of double sided tape and PVA glue, with some badly thought out card formers) other than to point out that everything you can see was printed from one or more scalescenes.com sheets. All the structures on Jerusalem were built from scalescenes.com kits and I was impressed by how (relatively) easy they were to build and how realistic they looked. This scene is actually made up from a few parts from their small goods store kit (it used to be a free download but seems to have disappeared from their site) while the wall is from the ashlar texture sheet and the roof from grey roof tiles. The structure itself is inspired by a similar structure at the Leeds Industrial Museum (see this excellent photo).

I'm quite happy with how this has all turned out. The cobbles look good over a larger area, the scalescenes.com papers have produced a reasonable building, which would be improved with extra detailing on a real model (gutters, drain pipes etc.) so now all I really need to get cracking on the layout itself is a track plan. I really should give it some more thought, but I'll probably get distracted by some more locomotive and rolling stock construction first!