Is this the right place to start my "Get Marty's Diorama picture selected for header picture campaign???"
  Come on lads……get yer votes in now.You know it makes sense!

:Happy
Cheers,John.B.(envious of Hyde)

Too ealy for voting John, good try though.

:oops: :oops: :oops: Thanks Lads,

I'll try not to swamp you with too much of the same thing.

My new Ixion GWR Manor class engine has arrived and I'm itching to use the diorama as a backdrop for her but not until it's finished.

More as it comes to hand, and speaking of hands, hoping that those of you on restricted modelling duties due to injury are healing up nicely.

cheers

Marty,
       Come on,lets see a piccy of your latest toy.Don't be a spoilsport……share it with your Uncle John!!!


Cheers,John.B.

Come on Marty, lets see that little outhouse on there!!

Soon my precious', very soon, because… we likes it!

But, in the mean time…

What's next?  Access to the platform.

Photos or descriptions of how to get onto the halt were hard to come by so some modelling license has been used.
The halt is a minor stopping place so I imagine local materials would have been used to keep costs down and engineering works would have been kept to a minimum too.
After looking at photos of other halts in Vaughan's book, a path along the bank leading to a small flight of steps and a plank bridge are about as fancy as the construction is going to get.

Access to the platform is via the rear through the wood and between the stopping board and the bench.



Looking down from the Altycefan road bridge it's a bit difficult to see the bank behind the platform but it is obvious that before any work is done the Triffids are going to have to be asked to move on!



Well that was easy… just waved a big bottle of Glyphosate about and they were off ;-).
The trees on the backscene need tidying and gluing down first.
Lots of different tree pictures were cut up and tried to see how well the colours matched with the modelled trees. In the end, the backdrop trees will be mostly hidden by the modelled ones and time was a-wasting so the bullet was bitten.



Next the plank bridge constructed from plasticard, two pieces of 1mm plain laminated with 1 sheet of timber planking, and put in place…. ahh.. a little too steep for my liking.



That's better, some careful digging with pointy end of a craft knife (with both the reading glasses and optivisor on) and a recess in the bank accommodates the bridge part nicely.



Next… the steps and the path. The railings and re-vegetation.

It's a bit like landscape gardening… without the sweat.

Any thoughts? (apart from the platform needing a sweep!)

I will wait until you are finished before I make my final comment BUT I do not like those cutout photos of trees in the last 3 pics.

Yeah, I'm a bit iffy about them myself but we'll see once the Triffids are planted back onto the bank in front of the cut outs.

Oh… I'm also attaching foliage directly to the cut-outs too, did a bit just before bed last night and didn't take a photo. There really will be very little of the cut out to see.
The other thing is that this is N scale and the macro zoom will show a pimple on a gnat's …..
Alternatives? … to the cut outs that is… not the Gnat's anatomy :roll:

wow  with Glyphosate John Wyndham could have had a short story, instead of a long-wyndhed novel

Not a fan of those cutouts either, but I reckon they'll be a valuable fill-in and will work out well.

 Mike

 … and deprived us of some wonderful entertainment. Glad he didn't :cool:

I'm fairly confident that the cut-outs will provide a good in-fill behind the trees, the only part I'm worried about is where the trees meet the sky, there the change is too abrupt.
We shall see.

Marty  maybe in your image program you could spraypaint some transparent milky blue over the uppermost edges of the trees to soften the join.

 Mike

.. and then print it out again and glue over the top of what is already there… that's an option.
Mike, what about dabs of sky coloured paint on what is already there? It would have to be thin or it might look weird?

I think it would look a bit weird - not that I've tried such a thing myself. Yes as you said it would need to be very thin.

 Mike

I'm waiting for reforestation to take place before saying anything as, if the first picture is anything to go by, I don't think there will be much of a problem then.

[user=2]Robert[/user] wrote:

I'm waiting for reforestation 

 

That's what I thought, but I couldn't think of the word

Marty, I've had a simular problem on the "forestry backscene" on my layout, so I'll be interested to see how you overcome it.

I've tried a few tests with some scrap backscene pieces, including using some foliage scatter over the trees, brought up to just above the join line (but only in places and only thin). This seems to have potential, but the technique needs some more work.

The other trial I did involved using some thin watercolour, closely matched to the tree colours to "feather" the edges. Now if I was any good at painting, this may have been better, so I've decided that I don't need a new backscene, just one of the "Bob Ross" series instruction books :exclam:exclam

Perhaps re-printing the trees with a deal of 'blur' and, say, 20% transparency would help them receded visually ?

Marty,
       I know what the lads are saying about the backdrop,but I'm sure you're going to solve it. I think the "re-forestation" will pull it all together.I like the sound of dooferdogs' idea.It will push the background further back if the image is treated that way.:thumbs

Cheers,John.B.

Thanks for all your thoughts and comments.

The Wood

The concensus seems to be to either fade the tops of the trees in photoshop (or similar) before printing, cutting and pasting or to try and cover the cut line with scatter/foliage.

I've gone for the scatter option and will try and make the low relief trees that are being constructed against the backscene a bit taller to allow for covering the join.

It's a bit tricky, quite easy to over do and spoil the 3D effect I'm trying to get for the wood. Here's hoping.

Once again, this is a "how I 'dun it" which will hopefully help others…  decide that this is the way that they won't do it   

Below is an early picture to show construction of the low relief trees. A couple of twigs gathered from the garden have been split in half to form low relief trunks. Then Noch foliage was stuck down and in the photo are quite "flat", once the neat PVA dries a pair of tweezers is used to pull and push the foliage about to give a more random, fluffy look.



While the glue was drying on the trees and in between trying to visulise what the wood was meant to look like, work started on the steps that will lead from the path on the bank down to the platform.
Pottering around the local hobby shop produced a Ratio concrete bridge which was used to size the Evergreen Styrene strip purchased to produce the stairs. The Ratio kit was then carefully put back on the shelf.

The Steps

.040 x .125 rectangular cross section was cut into lengths and glued together.



Eventually producing a tread pattern that looks OK to me.



DD's Hut

Waiting for the glue to dry on the steps…

The print out of the hut was laminated to some thin card (not thin enough it turns out) and then the plain wood plank texture laminated to the back of the card.
Once dry, a sharp blade in the craft knife and a steel rule was used to cut out the main walls of the hut.
It is so TINY, my clod hopping fingers found it difficult to manipulate it into shape and at this stage it looks a bit sad.



The finished hut, braced now with it's roof, door and base has come out satisfactorily and a photo will appear of it on the layout shortly.

The Steps and the Wood

The glue dry on both the steps and some of the low relief trees a bit more landscaping took place.

The steps were given retaining/supporting sides and were cut into the bank, painting and weathering still required.
A new 3d tree has been added behind the bench and the low relief trees have been "fluffed" out.
I'm still working on the transition between tree tops and sky, photos as they come to hand.





Heading in the right direction?

Oh, and the platform still needs sweeping, where is that lad porter?

Heading in the right direction. Very, very nice!

 Mike