The Mountains Gain Flesh

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

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

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 [...]

Shogatsu: Festive Foam is Go!

White and red are the colors of the Japanese New Year, Shōgatsu, and (for now) our layout reflects those colors in white and pink foam. Amy and I have decided to name it simply “Shōgatsu”. Anyway, this weekend we have significant real construction!

I’ve always been rather intimidated by those 8′x4′ sheets of [...]

Shogatsu Layout (正月のレイアウト)

Last year, my wife Amy made a Christmas layout around our Christmas tree. It was made from a cheap second-hand H0 set, and lots of fake snow sheets and batting, and some terribly out-of-scale dollar-store Christmas village houses. It was terrific. We both loved it. In fact, it was that project that got me [...]