- Orphan Valley Model Railway -

Following on from the blog about starting to add vegetation and creating gum trees, here is a method of creating woody bushes that I have found works effectively and uses discarded material You will need: Drill some holes in offcuts of 9mm or similar mdf. Note the used basket liner on tray. a well used hanging basked liner that has been in the sun for a while and has past its use by date. coloured no more gaps flat black or dark colored spray paint spray adhesive various grades of scatter material or ground foams eg woodland scenics. Here is the process in photos. As always click on the picture for a larger version. Grap a little bunch of material and twist in fingers. Then apply some no more gaps and twist the base nice and tight. Pull the twisted base through the hole in the mdf as far as you can and then splay the tops out an then trim to shape with scissors. I also tried adding some extra twigs to create some sturdier branches. The tuck in...

This morning I have been working on some background trees to help merge from the 2-d background to the 3-d realm of scenery. A while a go I found in Spotlight these bunches of brushy plants used for bouquets  and home decoration. They were a beautiful pinky purple colour, but the dried flower heads formed a nice shape like a gum trees canopy and there was enough overlay to stems to create and illusion of depth. So with a bit of spray paint, and fine ground foam, this is the result. See notes below. I sprayed the pieces of bunch with some manor red to tone down the pinky colour. There are some dried sedum heads pn the bench as well. Design Master colours available from florist supplies give some good Australian greens. The finished trees after spraying the trunks with an off white tannish spray. I created a simple paper mask to spray through so the green wasn't overly effected.   The trees added in behind clumped ground foam and the foregr...

Here we go on a long blog entry.. got to start somewhere.  I am part of a group of modellers who meet on a Friday evening called ModofAu . Each year the group exhibits a layout at the Perth Model Railway Exhibition at the Claremont Showgrounds on the June Long weekend. This year they decided to go On30 .  So I thought I would join them and build one of the modules that would be combined to form a bigger group of modules around 16m long. Each individual module is 1.8m long by 60 cms deep. The track would enter and exit in the middle of each end and be linked together by a short section. The main theme of the collective layout was logging, but we had an open palette to what we designed and included on our individual module...so I thought this would give me a chance to try out some ideas and techniques for the Orphan Valley home layout. My area contains a valley, small pond for loco refilling, artists residence and studio, a small local fuel depot and dirt roads. ...