How my railroad interests moved from the Pacific Northwest to Southern New South Wales .....with a stop over in Southern California


Wednesday, July 14, 2010

Finally - Some Progress!!!!







Hot
Well....it's July in Texas.

Time to get motivated for anything that keeps you in air conditioned 
comfort.

So, that means time to stop procrastinating on starting the scenery.

A couple of months ago, in an unusual spurt of energy, I tried out 
the hydrocal soaked paper towels over screen on a curve leaving 
Willow Tree.   I was very displeased with the result.   So this time 
I'm trying Sculptamold  (a cellulose based modeling compound similar 
to papier mache)

I spent an hour in the big box home improvement store trying to 
choose a brown latex paint color that i thought would be a good base 
for the soil in the area I'm modeling.  You can mix watered down paint 
with the Scuptamold to avoid white areas, should the top layer get 
chipped.


Here is the test area before sculptamold (the white area on the curve 
is the plaster-soaked towel experiment):























I added very little support under the screen, so it took 4 separate 
applications over a 1 week period, letting each one set for a couple 
of days to build up strength.  

The results were much more acceptable.  A little on the coarse side, 
but a little sanding should smooth everything out.  My choice of 
brown for earth color ended up being a little lighter than I was 
hoping....but I guess it's better to be too light than too dark.  
Painting during later scenery stages can darken it up.

The brown doesn't really photograph too well....
but here are the results:

Guess I better stock up on the Sculptamold...
summer has a long way to go!