Weighbridge Office - Part 2

Here's a few images showing progress on the weighbridge office...




You can see the way the building is constructed, as I described in the earlier post, using two layers of 40 thou plasticard covered with embossed brick sheet.

The floorboards were scribed into the floor. The lintels are paper, drawn on the computer and cut out using a sharp knife - the best option I could come up with in the end! The whole building will eventually sit down into a cut-out in the groundwork of the layout, hence the height of the floor compared to the base of the walls.

Painting has been a very slow process and isn't finished yet. Initially I gave the entire building an undercoat of dirty grey inside and out - the colour you can see on the inside of the building in these photos. Next I painted the external walls a brick colour (a pinky, orangey, browny colour to be precise!!).

Then I followed Martyn Welch's instructions in 'The Art of Weathering', painting a mortar colour (very pale mix of Humbrol white and stone) all over the brickwork (one wall at a time), waiting until touch dry, then gently wiping the paint off the surface of the bricks using a cloth moistened with thinners. In the end I had to repeat this process several times, and I struggled to find a suitable 'cloth' that would get into all the crevices adequately without either leaving too much or too little 'mortar', and without leaving fibres in the paint. In the end, with varying degrees of success, I used a combination of small pieces of disposable computer screen cleaning cloths (the sort you can buy from office suppliers) ,and my fingers! I think probably fingers are the better option, as the screen cleaning cloths tend to soak up too much thinners then dry out very quickly, can't really be cleaned, and quickly deteriorate.

Following on from this I gently dry-brushed the walls with a subtle mixture of Humbrol orange, brick red and flesh colours to bring out the colour of the bricks. This also has the added benefit of toning down the mortar courses which by this stage were rather too prominent from a distance.

I still need to pick out some of the bricks in various lighter and darker colours, and add some general weathering before the painting is complete, and that's before I add the windows, door and roof! A modeller's work is never done!

So far I'm reasonably happy with how things are progressing, although being a perfectionsist I do beat myself up about the quality of my models. But this is the first plastic structure model I've tackled so I can't expect miracles!