Monthly Archives: July 2015
Over the last few weekends in odd moments in between gardening I have put together and painted another Slaters Salt van.
In contrast to the one I built earlier which was depicted as faded and worn I wanted this one to be in a recently out shopped version of the livery so I started by giving the wagon a good coat of paint (as opposed to the deliberately patch finish on the first one).
Next I pondered on how to get over the fact that the transfers which are homemade and printed on clear decal paper have a tendency for the colour to wash out of the yellow when applied over a green base coat.
While it worked brilliantly for the faded livery it doesn’t for a newly painted livery so I thought that I would have a go at over painting the yellow bit of the lettering by hand.
I used Vallejo Sunshine yellow but found that it took a few coats to get it to cover on the slippery surface of the transfers. In all it took six sessions over two weekends to do both sides it’s far from perfect but I am happy with the results and I will use the technique again.
Playing about with image stacking
Last night I had a mess about with image stacking – I am quite pleased with the results so far. Each final image is made up from 5 original images combined into one.
Floor Cloth anyone?
While I had the paints out I also finished the weathering on the NBR Floor Cloth wagon that I built from a Majestic Models Kit (Now with Chris Basten at Dragon Models).
The ‘floor cloth’ rolls are made from coloured light card (file dividers). I just need to add a tarpaulin sheet now to finish it off.
Wagon Loads from Coffee Stirrers Revisited
I have been tinkering around painting some of the wagon loads that I have made from coffee stirrers and thought that I would share them posed in my latest wagon.
More from the NBR
Although I haven’t managed any modelling while in Wakefield for what seems to be far too long I did manage a bit more painting and weathering over the weekend. Apart from couplings the NBR Dropside wagon is finished.
It’s not clearly visible anymore but I have added a paint date of ’19 in the crescent on the sides and weathered it based on photos of NBR 3 and 4 plank wagons in Tatlow.
Lastly I added it’s load after playing around painting that with some ‘wood’ coloured paint….
A ropey tale……
Modelling has taken a bit of a back seat to gardening and work the last few weeks so it was good to do a bit over the weekend.
I started by re-roping the NBR open – the sisal string that I used originally just didn’t look right. Chris found me something better and I also took Bob Alderman’s advice and ran it through block of beeswax which makes it much easier to use and smooths off the “hairiness” of the cord.
I took the opportunity of shredding a bit more sisal string and colouring it to add to the ‘straw’ packing. It all looks big in this close up but it’s quite fine cord at normal viewing distances.
Although they haven’t been in front of the camera yet I have painted and added transfers to the NBR dropside and another Slaters Salt wagon. Plus I have weathered the wood insides of both the dropside and the NBR Floor Cloth wagon that I built many moons ago. Once I have weathered the outsides I will take photos.