Akihabara Station » mountains

Major Earthworks Complete

D.E. Goodman-Wilson — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 20:47:08 +0000

The mountains, complete

I’m back, more or less! I hope all had a great winter holiday.

As you can see, plastering is now 100% complete. A few final comments on the plastering process: Some things I have learned. Bare plaster soaks up acrylic paint, and mixes with it. Painting plaster mountains requires that, [...]

The Hillock that Thinks Itself a Mountain

D.E. Goodman-Wilson — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 03:09:48 +0000

Again, progress. What can I say? Sorry I didn’t get this up yesterday: We accomplished all this in a Sunday afternoon. Next weekend we hope to finish with the plaster cloth, and to begin detailing in earnest.

I also got in a Tomix Cleaning Car this weekend. The short version is that [...]

Addition of Foliage

D.E. Goodman-Wilson — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 22:08:23 +0000

I’ve only put a little foliage down on part of the layout, but there’s just enough to begin experimenting with model train photography. Here we see EF66-28 emerge from a tunnel on the…well, I guess I have to make up a name for this line, don’t [...]

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 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. [...]

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 [...]