Isle Ornsay

[invercloy]

A little more progress to repot..

I've been busying myself in the evenings of late by progressing the Harbour Office.

Here's what it looked like before, foamboard shell and mounting board card roof.



To this I added some strip wood for the window sills. On the base I cut the foamboard down to roughly half thickness and then replaced this with a thin layer of Das clay. This was to represent the stone layers beneath the mortar so I could apply the Das on top of the foamboard elsewhere, leaving a few patches of the exposed stonework where the render had been chipped away after being battered by the sea.



The 'top' layer of Das to represent the render was then applied and sanded with wet and dry paper to achieve a smoother finish, though not perfectly flat as that would look wrong to my eye... After this I added slates to the roof following the advice in Dave Rowe's architectural modelling book. The slates are made from paper from a cuttings book, so they have a slight texture to them, but only enough to represent a surface that isn't quite perfectly smooth.



And here it is within it's surroundings in the bay...



More soon!

[invercloy]

Time to dig out this thread and update it...

I'm currently working on painting the quay. The technique I use is that of a base colour to represent shadows between rocks or stones. The colour applied is a 50/50 mix of Payne's Grey and Raw Umber.

Before:


After:


This is then left to thoroughly dry for 24 hours before a further layer is added to start to apply colour. The first stage is a dry brush of pale umber, with raw umber mixed in here and there. The intention of this stage is just to give some colour to the surface of the stones, further detailed colouring will be done with pastels.

A cruel closeup of the finish:
[url=https://flic.kr/p/p3cjF3]

You don't have to be neat to get to this stage - i drybrushed with a fairly wide flat brush (1/2in across).

Here's the effect from a distance to show what it looks like:




It's not great finish wise, but it gives a good, fairly random, base to work from for the detailed colouring.

When i've applied the pastels to complete the effect I'll post some more photos.

[gtmspyder]

As ever Tom, very evocative, keep up the good work.

Mine seems to have stalled at the moment.

Kind regards,

BrianT.

[Tigger]

That's a helluva lot of hard work Tom - well done, it looks excellent!

[invercloy]

Thanks both, some more progress now the pastels have been delivered...





The pastels being used - make sure you buy 'soft' ones. These represented a good range of greys and browns for a reasonable sum.


Another cruel closeup showing the first steps of randomly applying a variety of colours to the stones.


The effect from a slightly more reasonable distance, but still well below the 3' rule!


Colours blended together slightly, smudged digitally.


Couldn't resist placing some items to see how it looked.






I wasn't happy with the dark areas between the rails, so i've added some more colour to get rid of the light areas showing through. I think I now need to add some raw umber to tone down the black slightly.


From above to give an idea of colour variation.


3' rule applied. I'm happy with the tone of the colours used, i may apply a little more variation, but not much. I still want to tone down the black areas around the rails slightly, but i'm very happy with the way it's going.

[DeadHorse]

Stop that. You will go blind!  ::)

[Tigger]

Tom - that looks absolutely superb!! Well done.

Quick question - do you ever find that the pastels leave a shiny or slightly shiny surface?

[invercloy]

Nope, they give a nice matt finish. The only slightly gloss finish is where they have had a lot of smudging to blend colours, ie the area of black between the tracks, and even that isn't that pronounced. The greys and browns on all the stone setts have a nice matte finish to them.

[Krizzy]

Shiny black between the rails? You can always say it is the oil and water from the locos. Very realistic!

Roger

[invercloy]

I was thinking that, Roger, but want to get it to more of a satin finish.

[invercloy]

After an enjoyable extended weekend with my family in Devon I returned home to a note telling me to go to the sorting office to collect a parcel...
 
It turned out to be a Townstreet Post Office Cottage kit I recently bought. On opening the extremely well packed box I found a few free castings to try painting, they were cracked/seconds which will serve the purpose very well. The quality of them was really encouraging, so i delved in to the packaging to fish out the cottage kit...
 
As a reminder, here's what the end result looks like from the Townstreet website:

 
The kit is very simple it consists of only 6 pieces; two ends, two sections of roof, a front with post office footage, and a rear with only a cottage frontage - this means there's also a second version of the kit for

[invercloy]

I've pretty much finished the digital photo editing for the backscene for the layout. At 5.5m x 345mm it's pretty large!
 
The photos used are a composite of many images I took from the actual location where Isle Ornsay station would have been built.
 
I've deliberately gone for an overcast sky, or 'dreich' sky as I feel it's a little different from the norm of blue sky, and i had some positive comments whilst exhibiting Dunbracken which had a similarly coloured backscene. 
 
Here's an overview of the whole thing in Photoshop:
 

 
The black area is there to remind me not to put anything on it - it's the area which is above sea level on the end board, but below track level for the rest of the layout, so its pointless adding photos to it. The white and grey hatches areas are hidden behind the hills, so same thing there too.
 
Now a few more closeups with the location where the respective section of the image will fit...
 
Here's an overview of the layout as a reminder of the context:

 
So...
 
[img=https://farm8.staticflickr.com/7566/15927380696_93e71537f7_c.jpg[/img]http:// 
This goes behind the pier at the far left hand end of the layout. The harbour that's visible in the middle distance is actually Isle Ornsay itself, approximately 1/4mile south of the station site. 
 
It will sit here with the paddle steamer in the sea at the far left hand end:

 
Next, the backscene disappears behind the headland at the rear of the platform, and reappears behind the beach and quay section looking like this:
 

 
Which will go here:
 

 
and finally the right hand end of the backscene:
 

 
Which will go across the end of the layout and around the back of the goods yard (i need to add something to give a curve rather than a right angle in the sky), here:
 

 
There are some awful gaps in the timber for the backscene in the images of the layout Ive shown so far, most of them don't have the baseboards screwed together, but i will need to add a small amount of bracing to the rear to get the alignment slightly better before I apply the image for a final fix.
 
Not long now, i'm hoping that once the backscene has been applied it will make a serious improvement in the appearance of the layout... 

[Sven]

I probably said it before, but I say it again: this is going to be one of the most exiting layouts in years when it's (as good as) finished.

[invercloy]

Err... Not sure what to say to that really, thanks Sven!

All being well it will be exhibited at ExpoNG and the WHR superpower events next year, so if you can make either of them you'll get to see it in a hopefully completed state.

[invercloy]

Recently I've been adding the backscene to the layout after completing some basic woodwork.

Here are some shots during it's fitting. I applied neat PVA glue with a roller which created some bubbles under the photo whilst it was wet. However with time I learnt that the best way to treat this was to do absolutely nothing. Once dried overnight the paper had gone taught again and there were no wrinkles or bubbles at all.

















and finally the one I'm most pleased with:



So the backscene is now in place, time to move on to scenic tasks to get the rest of the layout up to the standard of the area around the pier.