I've just joined our local train club, good friendly bunch of people.
I'm making good use of their extensive library. Came across a very interesting article by Lionel Strang on page 110 of Model Railroader March 2003 about peoples fear of making scenery.
One of the things I'm looking forward to is making scenery on the layout I am currently building. Being an art teacher I am well aware of students who think their efforts will not measure up to others and I believe now, since reading Lionel's article that this is the reason I have built 50 layouts and never started the scenery.
Well that is all going to CHANGE.Some time in January I will post photos on my progress. The layout is 14' x 22' and I have to have something up and running, including some scenery, before my grandchildren arrive in January.
God bless, Alan
Slap some stuff down and stick a bunch of trees in it. Spray paint the whole thing until you get it to where you can take a picture and not find a zillion wrong things.
You never know what you can do until you try.
My scenery once consisted of one shiney glossy green life like grass mat back in the late 70's I think I still have mental scars from such a awful color and sheen.
Modeling B&O- Chessie Bob K. www.ssmrc.org
I can vouch for the Life-Like green mat thing...not a pretty sight. I just kept dyeing and trying until I got something I liked. The worst that can happen is that you tear it up and do it again.
Bob Berger, C.O.O. N-ovation & Northwestern R.R. My patio layout....SEE IT HERE
There's no place like ~/ ;)
luvadj wrote: I can vouch for the Life-Like green mat thing...not a pretty sight. I just kept dyeing and trying until I got something I liked. The worst that can happen is that you tear it up and do it again.
I used the grass mats for a couple of residential neighborhood manicured lawns. They work OK for that, but I can't think of anyplace else that they would look even a little realistic.
Dave
Lackawanna Route of the Phoebe Snow
The first time you slap down some matte medium, spread the ground foam on it and see how nice it looks, the fear goes away.
Back in the 1960s it was amazing how many really nice layouts had no scenery whatever to speak of. But back in those days the common way to do "grass" was dyed sawdust, and commercial trees looked like bottle brushes (literally). To do good scenery was hard work, in spite of articles by Linn Westcott and books such as Bill McClanahan's, telling you how easy it all was.
You can almost pinpoint when this changed: it was when Woodland Scenics come out with their line of scenery materials AND, perhaps most important of all, created point of purchase displays for hobby shops so that the scenery stuff could be in the train department of the hobby shop, not in the craft section. I think that was key. Look how long it took model railroaders to discover Sculptamold -- because it wasn't in the train department.
Dave Nelson
I had Fear of Benchwork before I started, but once I started making sawdust it was fine.
With scenery, what's the never-popular Worst Case Scenario? Well, it looks crummy, and you have to rip it up. So, you've wasted a few dollars worth of plaster and paint. Big deal. And you've learned more, even in failure, from that experience than you ever could from a book or video that would have cost 5 times as much. Sometimes, even the trash can can be your friend.
It takes an iron man to play with a toy iron horse.