DIY 4mm/00 people

I get great pleasure from photographing my model railway by staging a scene in a photograph of the prototype. The next one I have in mind is of a train waiting in the platform with a few passengers on the platform, some seeing off their friends or relations. I have scoured the web for commercially available little people and found a couple that could do for some of them. But, there are others for which commercial models do not fit well either because of fashion/period or their stance. So, I need to consider creating my own little people. There seems to be three methods open to me. 1) 3D printing is a very exiting technology. Our little people have to be built in 3D design software and the resulting print file loaded into the 3D printer. The actual model is made in open air on an XYZ platform using plastic that is melted and ejected from a nozel. 2) Moulding requires making a model in clay or something mailable and creating a mould from it which is then used to produce robust replicas in resin or whitemetal. This is ok if we want to create duplicates to sell, for example. 3) Modelling is about making the little people individually from a clay material like FIMO. This approach is very low cost, a few pence per person. The tricky bit it seems to me is creating the head with facial features. I have an idea how to achieve that. I'm going to attempt 3). To Part 2

Through The Looking Glass

Misterton was an end to end layout with an operating area on the 'back side' and viewing area on the 'front side'. After its conversion to an oval layout the operating side also became the viewing side. Whilst it is possible to crawl underneath to the original viewing side the gap there is really too narrow for comfortable viewing. That's a shame because there are interesting views there that are rarely seen. 

A trip to Ikea today to buy a couple of cheap mirrors (£5.99 each in 2010) to place on the wall and now we can appreciate the views from the other side of the railway line. OK, so the frames are unsightly and the join more so but they can be blended into the wall with a coat of blue paint. You know the funny thing about this is that when you are standing in the railway room looking at the layout or operating the trains your mind does not notice things like that, nor the clutter elsewhere in the room.

If we get down at eye level the scene really takes on a new dimension. This photo was taken looking into the mirror. Apart from seeing a side of the station building that is normally hidden we also see across the void of the operating area to the scenic section on the other side of the oval! The landscape and backscene there now become the backscene for this view! It's magical and bizarre like "Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There".

Backscenes at Hewish Gates

I'm a late-comer to the current practice of many who now create backscenes from photographs. In the old days I had a go at painting backscenes or using Peco art backscenes - was not too impressed, so I reverted to just sky blue paint. Nothing could have prepared me for the amazing effect of using photographs of the real location. They add atmosphere and depth to the model on a scale I did not expect.

I created a panorama of stitched photos in Photoshop. Not all the scene is from one contiguous location. The landscape is varied enough that different areas can be stitched together to blend with the foreground model landscape.

The sky was cut out of the panorama and replaced with a sky blue layer, only because I felt the cloud formations would be a distraction from the model. Brightness and Saturation levels were adjusted negatively to produce toned down colours representative of the distant landscape. The scene was then cut into A4 chunks and printed. Each A4 is stuck to the next with double sided tape and this is stuck to the backboard.