......because of its transparency it is necessary to hand select each piece of wood used for color,grain,unwanted out of scale imperfections etc..... With this station /passenger car I have lots of leeway with the wood but remember that at one time this was a functioning RR car, so I will build it aged but some of the original car will still be there.When I get to building Morton's luxury car when using various hardwoods ,I will have to be much more careful with both the miniature carpentry and wood finishes. OK so now we have a lot of stained wood of various wood tones and grays.Now we will have to decide whether or not to take the weathering process a little farther at this point or not.If you will always have easy access to the wood like on the outside of a shack wall ,go ahead and use it as is, but if it is inside in a confined area you can take it a few steps further at this time. (With this method no airbrushing is required and the methodology is very forgiving of mistakes.) Get an old toothbrush with stiff fine bristles,then mix up a very thin wash of raw umber and water.Raw umber is best for this step as it makes for a nice representation of mud flecks,fly$1***$2etc...Dunk your toothbrush in the mix and flick off most of the contents onto a sheet of paper with your thumb.When you get down to a very fine spray then flick it on your work ,either board by board or section by section that you are working on.If you have prepared your boards properly it with instantly sink into the wood and dry very quickly.Keep doing this until you are satisfied ,and remember some boards that are close to the ground may require a gradual change in intensity top to bottom.Later some may even require a little mossy green were they come in contact with the ground. to be cont.......
Once Upon a time.........
My photobucket:
http://s6.photobucket.com/albums/y250/JohnReid/
I am a man of few words but lots of pics
I quit drinking beer because the download was taking longer than the upload !
......On the areas where you may only have restricted access to later on, you may want to do some of the detail now such as dents, nicks, scratches,putting up old of new signs,making rusty nails and nail holes and pre-shading with chalk pastels.With the use of pastels on dry unfinished rough wood, this is where my method is a little different than most.On most surfaces chalk pastels will easily rub off but on rough wood surfaces they are quite permanent as is, with no fixative required.Remember I am doing a diorama here, so it is just to look at.If I was using the same method on shiny plastic that is meant to be handled,I would roughen up the surface to get a little tooth in it before applying the pastels and then use a pastel spray fixative over that.I will mark that on my list for further experimentation.For now lets just deal with the barn siding look.OK so now we have this gray transparent surface with a little wood color and grain showing through.Perfect! Lets add some nail holes and rusty nails which is common with most old wood.Find a pattern that you like or just put a few here and there but remember you are probably( in real life )nailing into joists or studs which will create its own pattern.Rather than have a whole bunch of old boards with a straight line of nails running across them which is boring,you may want to create a different pattern.I often use a kind of zig-zag pattern to avoid this.......to be continued(the doorbell is ringing!)
Using the smallest coffee stir stiks in my arsenal ,the movie side sheathing has begun.First I cut out some veneer and glued it over the plastic, over that I glued the vertical sheathing which is slightly larger that that depicted on the model.The outward side has been aged a bit and will be finished later as in the film.I really don't know how this set was built for the movie and of course you don't see any of it in the film.I don't know of any pics that have survived of the actual set so I will just have to use my imagination here.I am assuming that a real old railway car was used and a set built around it.I am probably wrong about this but using an old car makes it more interesting for my purposes and I think for my RR buds following this thread and gives me a great place to start.
This is the interior of the same wall.I placed the rough cut boards horizontally because if I decide to light the car from above it will have a more dramatic effect.I covered over all the windows except one which will have shutters.(mostly for my picture taking purposes) These boards in real life would have been put up there in an attempt to make this area livable.The interior will be weathered but not to the extent of the outer side.How this car got there is not really explained in the movie.It looks like it got there in pretty rough shape to begin with.Why ? because if the railway was just pushing through this area, where did an old weathered rail car come from? It could be that its present resting place ,is just its final resting place , at the end of a long hard trail across the country.(maybe on a flat car)Anyway that is my story and I am stickin' to it !
I almost finished the interior ceiling ,the only thing left will be to do some shading with pastels after the sides are finished.I used some long thin coffee stir stiks and painted on some very thin nimbus gray /raw umber mix (95% gray,5% raw umber).I then glued them on with carpenters glue to the underlying cardboard roof that was pre-painted burnt umber .I left the boards really rough and warped for the aged look.When dry I took a pin and created holes in the wood in a random fashion, as though somebody had quickly nailed them up there at some point in the cars history ,for insulation purposes.I then used a ordinary HB pencil and twisted some graphite into each hole to represent a nail head.With a small brush I then took some very thin raw umber and put a small drop on each pin hole to swell the wood level again and add a little color.Next I mixed up a very thin wash of raw umber and with a stiff bristle tooth brush I flicked on some of this onto the ceiling.You could also have handy a thin wash of the gray and flick this on if things get too brownish.The trick here is knowing when to quit and not cover all of the underlying wood grain.The next couple of steps require that you be subtle in your work and don't over do it.Take a thin burnt sienna wash and with a very small round brush randomly put drops onto the nails to represent varying degrees of rust.Rust you say!! in the desert? Well like I said earlier this car only ended up here.Let it dry ,and then you can come back with another small brush and soften the rusty edges using a little burnt sienna chalk pastel.Also the ends of the boards tend to soak up a little color too.Now stand back a take a look If your not happy with the look you can always come back and flick on some more gray or raw umber if you want more color or to slightly change a shade.Here again you can play with this all day if you want.Have fun! The pics in my photobucket covers each of the steps involved.
Here we are getting close to the finished product.I added a little shading using black pastel applied very lightly with a small soft brush(kind of a miniature make up brush).Try to be very subtle about this ,try not to overdo it.If you blow up the picture(all my pics are 2 megs at least) you will see that the underlying wood grain is still there which is most important for this technique.Each piece of wood retains its individual pattern and color ,no two are alike.When I come to doing the luxury hardwood stuff on the other car, I will use no paint or stain just the natural colored wood, hand selected for grain,pattern and color.
This is the opening scene from the movie and is from the film set that I am constructing now.It looks old and chaotic but everything here has been purposely selected for maximum impact on the viewer.Nothing is square or at right angles to the other.The colors,the lighting,the textures,even the old clothes line wheel, all have a role in creating the scene.The drama is created by the anticipation of who is behind the door ?What better way to open a film than the opening of a door ?
This is about the most you ever see of the other side of the set,taken from a camera high angle near the water tower.The wicket /WC (every station needs one)was created with original parts of the model.On the inside of the window was the old telegraph machine that got on everybodys nerves and was ripped out by a baddy.On a old railway car bench on the outside was where the now famous "fly on the face" scene took place.Next up will be the shed to be built over top of the old car.This should be fun!
I have a choice for set #2 ,Morton's car.I can use another passenger car like the one I am doing now or use this Bachmann passenger/baggage car.I am assuming here that they adapted an already built car for movie making purposes.It probably never happened this way but I like the idea ! This car will be on its wheels and a set built around it.If I use the baggage car I will use one side of the already built car and adapt it to my purposes.It will not be the exact car from the movie but my interpretation of it.The passenger car section and part of the baggage area will be movie set.The rest of the baggage area will be a staging area.I like the paint job as is ,except I will be modifying it .Most of the green I will keep but will matte spray it with acrylic sealer and then finish it using pastels.The roof area will be matte black including the area with the RR letters,I will replace them with something more appropriate. The car will be broken down and gutted so only the shell remains.The interior will be in Victorian luxury style with elements from the movie and the Disneyland train.I will install the unique brass tubing near the ceiling that Morton used to move around the car.On the prop side I will put a backdrop of Monument Valley to add to the atmosphere.
You know the modern dioramist (word?) is soo lucky ! I am surprised that more of us haven't really used all the tools available to us for research and especially for visual playin' around.Sitting here at my computer I have available to me, in my own home,all the possible visual reference I could ever want.I can scan for the minutest detail and teach myself things that only a few short years ago you would have to go to film school for and even then it would be filtered through a teacher who has his own biases.This is really the golden age for visual artists who want to take advantage of all the tools now available to them.I never in my wildest dreams thought that this level of research was possible until just recently.When I was a kid going to the Saturday movies, my buds and I would come home and act out what we saw in the movies.Endless hours of childhood arguments over who did what or how, can now be solved instantly.This may or may not be a good thing for our childhood imaginations but now at least we can get on with playing the game.
The views part of this thread does not seem to be working.It has been stuck at 1082 views for a long time yet when I check my photobucket trains.com has a huge numbers of hits,Strange ............
Anyway,lets press on...........
Moving on to the shack portion of this RR diorama I am starting to put up the roof rafters and boards.I want to make both the cars roof and shack roof detachable for ease of working on and any future maintenance that may be required.I want this roof to look old so I put a little sway back in the beams.The wood was bent by simply steaming it a while over a stove top pan,then I took an old curling iron ,heated it up and hand bent it over the round tip.The center beam and rafters were then cut to length and installed right on the model.For this I used extra thick crazy glue to tack it all in place.Generally I don't use a lot of CA but for this tacking operation it really is the best way to go,from here on I will use the yellow carpenters glue as I am sensitive to the CA's fumes.This shack is a lot of fun to do,it is easy in one aspect as exact standards are not required due to the nature of what I am building but then again you really have to study your references to make it look right.
Tongue depressors make great roofing boards.The boards may look wide to the modern eye but they really were easily available in those days.Each board was hand selected for color,pattern , texture and lots of defects.Ten years ago I had bought a whole load of these second quality depressors and used the best of them for hangars that I was building .I kept what I thought was junk just in case,and a good thing it was that I did, because they are perfect for my purposes now.As a modeler one thing I learned early on was not to throw anything model related or what could be model related away.I used my usual nimbus gray/raw sienna mix and lots of water and created a wash.I put on three thin coats and dried between coats with a hair dryer.It is my normal practice to color my boards before putting them on the model but in this case I only want to paint the film set side and leave the prop side natural,like a prop would be in reality..You don't paint what won't be seen in the film! The carpentry is crude in keeping with what I see in my references.I haven't yet decided on the weathering I will do on these boards, because the desert environment is something new to me.There are two ways I can approach this, either the rail car was brought from the east and was mostly weathered in a damper environment with lots of rust etc... or leave the wood bleached from the sun ,or something in between.