Akihabara Station » layout

End of Shōgatsu Season

D.E. Goodman-Wilson — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 19:05:21 +0000

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 [...]

The Return of Shōgatsu

D.E. Goodman-Wilson — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 22:06:30 +0000

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 [...]

Airbrushing the Sidewalk

D.E. Goodman-Wilson — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 17:26:17 +0000

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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A New Start

D.E. Goodman-Wilson — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 03:40:57 +0000

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 [...]

I Beheld the Mountains, and, Lo, They Looked Surprisingly Good

D.E. Goodman-Wilson — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 03:53:31 +0000

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 [...]

The American Who Went Up a Hill…

D.E. Goodman-Wilson — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 01:45:12 +0000

…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, [...]

The Mountains Gain Flesh

D.E. Goodman-Wilson — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 01:09:10 +0000

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 [...]

Almost Done with Mountain Infrastructure

D.E. Goodman-Wilson — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 18:19:28 +0000

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. [...]

Links: Yamanote-sen

D.E. Goodman-Wilson — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 19:25:23 +0000

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 [...]

Mountains Begin to Emerge on Shogatsu

D.E. Goodman-Wilson — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 23:05:49 +0000

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 [...]