Sunday, November 9, 2014

Dry Stone Walling

Some of you may remember that back in March I built a couple of short sections of stone walling using brick papers from scalescenes.com. The first attempt was wrong as the stones were too big, and while the second attempt was better, the wall was just too flat with no relief. Having now abandoned brick papers for full structures in favour of embossed plastikard I decided I needed to have another go at building a stone wall. The result is this little test piece (using the driver from the Brian Madge Quarry Hunslet kit to give a sense of scale).


Personally I think this looks an order of magnitude better than my previous attempts. It did, however, taken an order of magnitude longer to produce as well. In fact that short piece of wall took all day, although some of that was waiting for DAS clay to dry. What you are looking at is a wall where each stone was cut and laid separately to produce a dry stone wall; albeit with PVA to keep the stones in place.

The technique I've used is based on Ian Nuttall's description of how he built dry stone walls for his layout (February 2013 edition of Railway Modeller). The idea is to create 6mm wide strips of DAS clay of varying heights that can be cut to make individual stones and used to model a 1' 6" wide wall. Rolling, measuring and and cutting DAS clay to the right sizes would be a pain, which is where the plastic tagliatelle comes in to play.

I built a jig from a sheet of 2mm plastikard and various sized square sections of plastruct. I used 1.5mm, 2mm, 2.5mm, 3.2mm, and 4mm sections to give five channels 6mm wide allowing me to model stones 4 1/2", 6", 7 1/2", 9 2/3" and 1' tall by simply pushing DAS into the channels of the jig. The problem is removing the DAS from the jig. The trick here is to place one of the plastic strips at the bottom of the channel, then add the DAS, and then just lift the plastic strip to remove the clay. Once the DAS has dried the plastic strip peels off easily and can be reused.


Once the clay strips have dried (I should possibly have left them a little longer but I was getting inpatient) they can be cut into individual stones; I found my track cutters worked really well for this bit. The wall is started by laying down a thin ribbon of PVA and placing the first course of stones. Small dabs of PVA are then used to add the further layers trying to avoid any leaking out the side of a join. I aimed for a level topped four foot high wall, before then adding the capping stones, which were slightly rounded, to give a wall approximately 4' 6" high. This seems to look about right next to the figure.

I painted the wall initially with RailMatch weathered stone (#2426) before giving the whole thing a black wash making sure to get the wash deep into the cracks where the base coat hadn't necessarily flowed. I then lightly dry brushed more weathered stone and some khaki (Model Color #988) to add a little variation. The final touch (which is mostly hidden behind the greenery) was to dry brush a little brown sand (Model Color #876) along the bottom of the wall to represent dirt having splashed up.

While the wall looked good at that point (I forgot to take any photos) I thought it was worth adding more scenery to see how it would look in the context of a layout rather than in isolation. I used some cheap burnt umber acrylic (I bought a large tube ages ago from WH Smiths) to provide a base colour and to hide the white cardboard. I then used Woodland Scenics green blend blended turf to provide ground cover before adding various shades of Woodland Scenics bushes and foliage clumps for bushes around the wall edges. The final touch was a little bit of yellow flowering foliage to the right side to add more colour.

Hopefully you will all agree that this looks a lot better than my previous brick paper attempts at making walls. Having said that it still isn't perfect, mostly as I think the proportion of large stones in the wall is too high; locally the walls are mostly small stones rather than large chunks. Changing the proportion of stone sizes though is easy so I think this is another scenic technique that I'm now happy with so another piece of the puzzle falls into place.

14 comments:

  1. It looks almost perfect. I would suggest A slight improvement by putting the larger stones at the bottom. A dry stone wall does have through stones but the bulk of it is two parallel rows with rubble in the middle.
    It does look good.

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    1. Yeah, I know I was cheating a bit by not building two parallel rows, but at this scale it wasn't really an option. The real walls also tend to narrow towards the top but I also didn't do that for similar reasons. Most of the time it won't be obvious anyway as the walls are likely to only be viewed from one side.

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  2. Excellent! But living in your part of the world there's no excuse for getting it wrong! I like the fact that you can see through the wall.
    Smaller stones would of course look better, but I'm sure that a wall made with them would take longer to make. Even with the bigger stones the result is better than anything else that I've seen. Most use plasticard as capping stones, which lacks texture, your method works far better, capping stones being very important to the look of the finished wall. The only thing that I would add is a light drybrushing of moss green.

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    1. Thanks Paul, glad you like it. I do need to get out and take some photos of the local prototype to get the balance of stone sizes right and yes I agree it could do with some moss or yellow lichen on it as well.

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  3. Pendon beckons... seriously though, this is great. And so it takes time...perfection can't be rushed, y'know! I would agree that small stones nearer the top, larger ones at the bottom...a good rule of thumb is to imagine if you could lift the stones that high :-) What a fiendishly clever use for that tagliatelle...I never got anywhere near. This wall is fabulous, well done sir! (Oh and I agree with Paul, the capstones are so good!)

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    1. Thanks Iain. It certainly did take quite a while to do, although I agree it was time well spent. I think I might not even bother making the 4mm strips in the future to avoid the temptation to add them to the wall. The 3.2mm or (9 2/3") strips are plenty big enough for the walls I see locally.

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  4. I think that's a damned clever idea, Mark. The jiggy thing. I don't personally like Das, but would use Hydrocal, but that's just a personal preference for materials. Milliput would be as good, but might not take gouache paint so well, which is my preferred media for scenery as it dries totally flat. But that is a nice wall, indeed and worth the time taken, which, of course, next time, will take a fraction of the time to do.

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    1. Making the jig and cutting the strips (I cut up the whole bag rather than wasting any) probably took longer than making the small section of wall, but it does make life nice and easy. Hydrocal might work, but I suppose I would need ends to the jog so I could pour it and would need to leave it to set in the jig, whereas with DAS or Milliput you can lift out of the jig immediately and leave to dry while making more strips. Milliput should work but as you say I think would be harder to paint, and probably harder to cut into separate stones that the DAS. I must admit I wasn't convinced by DAS the first time I tried it (I'd always used Milliput for filling gaps and things before), but it's growing on me as there is no preparation and I think it is slightly more versatile. Of course Milliput wins if you need it to set under water!

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  5. As a complete non-modeller I have nothing but admiration for the wall and learning how you made it was fascinating.

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  6. I thought this method was clever when I saw it in RM, you have shown it works really well and made a cracking job of that wall! I suppose if plaster were used it could be pre coloured making final painting easier.

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    1. Thanks Michael, glad you like it. Like you when I saw the original article it was one of those occasions when you think "oh, that's clever" and I've been meaning to give it a try for a while. I did wonder about trying to dye the DAS before putting it in the mould but couldn't think of a sensible way of doing it. Fortunately it seems as if getting paint into all the cracks isn't too important, at least not with the colour I was aiming for. I didn't try that hard with the base coat, only with the black wash to get it to go in all the cracks and that seems to have worked fairly well.

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  7. That's fantastic Mark!! I agree with the other comments regarding larger stones at the bottom. Having built a few dry stone walls with my dad when I was younger, that's the way we always did it. Ditto on the two rows with rubble in the middle. I see no problem using "through" stones (full width, minus rubble), it looks so much better than plastic sheeting or even plaster/hydrocal cast in a mold.

    Well done!

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    1. Thanks Jeff. I must admit to being really happy with how it came out. As everyone agrees it needs a little work regarding the placement of the different sized stones but in general I think it looks like a dry stone wall, rather than a solid cast lump which is what a lot of the ready to plant stuff looks like.

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    2. You most definitely should be happy... The result is fantastic! I agree with your comment on it being therapeutic. Stuff like this is very calming for me, not at all like chassis building.

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