I call it wonderwall because it's made from Oasis...

 

No no stop!  oh my ribs...

Super fast wall building

Oasis, for those who like me are a stranger to all things gardening, is a trade mark name for wet floral foam which is used in flower arranging.

It has some interesting properties for model making. It is incredibly light in weight and is very easy to cut with a scalpel, In its raw form it's quite fragile and has an interesting property that if you crush it, it stays crushed. It takes acrylic car spray paint without dissolving.

You can easily slice it into bricks for  making stonewalls in the same fashion as making them out of cork tile but a really fast way of making quite passable (in my world anyway) stone walling is as follows:

Slice the Oasis into wall sized lengths with a disposable 'snap off' craft knife blade. gently round off the top of the wall by squeezing the material twixt finger and thumb.
Using a slim sharp object of choice, such as a needle or toothpick, scribe out the pattern of stones, larger stones at the bottom. I have found it works best for me by making the scribe marks narrow but quite deep.

Once the stones are scribed, I gently go over the whole wall with a fairly soft brush, this opens up the courses between the stones and gives them more depth and adds a bit of texture to the face of the stones.
If you want to toughen the Oasis up, give it a good soak in a 50% PVA /water mix, be aware that Oasis is very absorbent.

A blow over with grey acrylic car primer gets it somewhere near a good base colour and also toughens up the surface a little. Don't worry about not getting paint into all the cracks and crevices, the darker colour of the Oasis gives them depth.   I use Halfords grey acrylic primer as it's good quality and the spray nozzle on the can gives good control over the spray pattern and delivery.

Once the base coat is dry you can set about tickling in various shades of suitable stone colours on individual rocks, adding little bits of green and orange to represent lichens and moss. You may want to add some highlights by dry brushing from one direction with a lighter colour. Subtlety is the key here. You can if you think it necessary, run in a little thin dark wash betwixt the stones, on the example below, I didn't bother.

The photography is quite cruel, but once in place on the layout and it blends in nicely.

One block of Oasis will make you around fifteen feet of stone wall in 7mm (O Gauge) about four times as much in 00. That's a lot of wall for around £3

Dry stone walls

A view of the engine house end of the mine working.

This dry stone wall is made from cork floor tiles which are fairly inexpensive from DIY places like Wickes etc. and odd packets can often be found on the remnants/special offer table. They are a useful source of quite robust building material.

The self adhesive type are preferable, the glue is very strong and cuts wall building time down considerably.

I slice the tiles into strips equivalent to the side to side dimension of the wall. I do this by first scoring about 1/3 the way through with a heavy duty craft knife, then snapping off the strip from the remainder of the tile. This leaves a suitably 'rocky' appearance to the edges. Then the strips are chopped across into random stone sizes, this makes each stone the full width of the wall but as you never see both sides of the wall at once, it doesn't matter. 

I find it handy to start building the wall on a strip of card for stability and to make it easier to paint once it's finished.

Start with larger stones at the bottom, getting  smaller as the wall rises overlapping the stones as you build.
You might also make the wall slightly narrower towards the top as in real life. You can stick in a large stone here and there for variety, and fill any gaps with thin slivers - but leave a few holes here and there for the wildlife to nest in.

How it looks under construction.

Capstones are thin slices of cork, there are many different styles, some are laid flat, some vertical , some at an angle and in some parts of the country every nth capstone is taller than the rest.

Gateposts are the same cork tile, several layers laminated together and sanded to shape.

Once it's all together you can blow on a couple of coats of suitable colour, add a bit of brown and green to represent moss etc., and maybe a bit of dry brushing with a light colour to highlight the craggyness of the stones.

When finished, the walls are fairly flexible and can be coaxed into gentle curves quite easily.

Don't go down the mine dad...

More corrugated iron, this time at the mine entrance.

The little mine train trundles up and down on an auto reverse timer. Diodes at either end of the track stop the train from overrunning.

Any old iron

Corrugated iron roofing in 7mm scale

Believe it or not, this little narrow gauge engine shed started life as the wrapper from a microwavable panini, (Two for one at Morrisons as it happens).

The edible  bit comes wrapped in a corrugated card tube which is lined inside with a silver card which I presume is heat reflective or something.

Once you have devoured the contents and scraped the escaped cheese off the inside of the wrapper, you are left with a roughly 8"x 6" square of raw material. 

You can easily separate the flat silver card from the wavy brown bit by slipping a cocktail stick up the corrugations and gently easing the two layers apart. I find that it's best to do this after you have cut the parts to size to avoid flattening the corrugations, also, you can mark out on the flat side easier. You could I suppose, leave the backing card in place for extra stiffness.

Cut with sharp scissors to avoid flattening the parts with a steel ruler.

The shed is a frame of sliced down coffee stirrers, perched on two low walls of foamboard covered in scored  brickpaper  - home made of course. The rivets on the ridge are just tiny dots of pva glue applied with a needle.

A quick blow over with Halfords grey primer and a bit of airbrushed on rust and Bob's yer uncle.

The little freelance quarry engine is a hastily constructed plasticard body sat on a Kato 4 wheel chassis. 

Hedges

Cheap n cheerful hedging 

The basic material is pound shop pan scrubbers which are very similar to 'Scotch-Brite' scouring pads but a fraction of the price. 

The process is pretty obvious, you cut it into scale hedge sized strips, scradge[1] it up with a sharp point such as a needle in a pin vice , dibble it with pva glue and apply scatter material of choice. Nice neat hedges don't need much scruffing up, but for unruly wild growth, you can claw at it mercilessly, pulling the material into lumps, bumps, and random 'twigs'

I find glue is best stippled on not too thickly, and the scatter shouldn't be too thick' so that the base material shows through. You could pehaps blow a little well thinned dark brown acrylic along the lower edge to represent the roots. It pays to experiment.

If you want long lengths of hedging, glue the strips end to end before scradging and the joints will disappear 

For 0 gauge (7mm) hedges, I double the pan scrubber over and secure it with Uhu. The end result looks somewhat better in 7mm  than in smaller scales, (see crossing keepers cottage.)

[1] is 'scradge' a real word? it should be and it fits anyway.

Club Corner

There is a little corner of the club railway, right next to the narrow gauge terminus, which until recently depicted a heliport. This doesn't really fit in with the 1930's(ish) period of the 0n16.5 section of the layout, so it was decided to move the heliport to a more secluded part of the railway and construct a little village scene.

I decided to make a series of separate sub boards for each building, partly because the village area is an odd shape and I haven't really got a plan to work to, but mainly so that I can do most of the building work at home, then plonk them in place at successive club nights

So, this is the first dwelling in the village, the crossing keepers cottage.

Based very loosely on a traditional Manx cottage, it was originally intended to be thatched, but my first attempt at a thatched roof fell down when making the ridge. I just couldn' t get it right and eventually ripped the whole roof off to start again. I was using the bristles from a large decorators brush and they proved just too stiff to form the ridge correctly. I will try again on a subsequent cottage using softer bristles and more patience.
As you will see, something still went astray with the tiled ridge on the crossing keepers cottage - I may have another bash at it sometime tho it probably doesn't really look too bad considering the intended slightly neglected look of the model.

A few things you might find interesting or helpful:
The hedges are made from poundshop pan scubber. The dry stone wall is made from small chunks of cork tile which is marvelous stuff for all sorts of modelling
The cabbages are made from a Crayola product called Model Magic, a kind of air drying foam based modelling compound.
The chicken run mesh is some kind of backing material used by dressmakers.

The large plants in the front garden are from a product called Lucky Reptile Flora Mat. Some of the produce  in the vegetable garden are offcuts from the same product.
I'll try to cover these things in later posts

I'm not altogether happy with the gravel paths, I might redo those at a later date, but as I always say "It ain't Pendon"