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 My family’s Christmas, er, New Year’s layout, Shogatsu, has been retired for the year. We haul it out of the basement for only a couple months each year, around New Year’s, to work on it and display it. This year’s time is up. We made some small progress on it, especially in forestation and village construction. New concrete retaining walls were built, and our village received a bath-house, a liquor store, a long string of merchant stalls for the New Year’s festival, and a portable shrine being hauled down the main street. It also received a new bit of rolling stock, a Tomytec モ1030.
Before we packed it up last weekend, I made a video of it, below.
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The New Year’s Festival has Already Begun
Up from the inky depths of the basement comes Shōgatsu, my family’s Christmas New Year’s layout! In the intervening months, we’ve collected a couple of TomyTec buildings. I’ve also managed to assemble and decal the various little festival stalls we bought last year. Finally, we’ve added a new train [...]
Well, it’s been a while, hasn’t it?
During my most recent visit, my brother-in-law very generously gave me some of his tools he didn’t need anymore, including one of his airbrushes, a Paasche VL (whose past life is on display). And for Fathers’ Day, my delightful wife gave me a compressor to drive it.
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Station on printed plans
With Shogatsu in storage until November, my attention has returned to Akihabara Station. Here’s where we stand: I have some viaduct station, some paper mockups of buildings, and a plan for the streets and sidewalks. Doesn’t look so bad, for basically a few laserjet printouts. I’m a little disappointed that I haven’t [...]
Perhaps I’m getting a bit ahead of myself here, but this is about where things stand. We’ve got mountains (sort of), and tunnel portals (mostly), and foliage (but just around this one tunnel portal). Things are looking good! The portal is a Greenmax, model no. 14-2, lightly weathered with India ink. The foliage is Woodland Scenics [...]
…but Came Down a Mountain. Nope, too long to have the right wittiness about it. I’ll keep on tryin’ though.
I couldn’t find any more RFTs, so I reverted to that old standby, Student Life (warning: PDF linkage). At a total of two sheets per issue, it took larcenous numbers to complete the job, but I don’t [...]
The time has come to begin filling in the skeleton with newspaper flesh. As you can see from the photo (sorry about the poor quality! Had to use my laptop’s webcam), I’ve added some more foamcore buttressing so that the topography of the two layout halves will match precisely. Kashirigi suggests making little newspaper bundles, but [...]
I can’t think of a witty title for this week’s Shogatsu post. As you can see, we’ve done up the skeletal understructure—the “subterrain” if you will—for the left half of the layout. Amy wants lots of layers, and she wants the shrine atop the mountain at the end of a steep switch-backed path. The town will [...]
I particularly enjoy blogs that document construction projects. Kashirigi’s Yamanote-sen is one of my favorites. He is a fantastic modeler, and his medium of choice is…paper. Even with no room for a layout in his small Vancouver apartment, he’s building one anyway: on a frame built from canvas stretchers, and hung on the wall when not [...]
Step 5: Backdrop and tunnels, part 1
More progress! If I can keep up this rate every weekend, it looks like we might have this done by December! We cut the layout in half to aid transportation and storage. If we hadn’t, the layout would almost certainly have ended up too large to fit through the [...]
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