10/21/16 - The Home Stretch

Just a few items left to finish up before it's done. 

The two main items to finish are the pond and park area, and the outside edge of the entire diorama.

I have covered the front and part of the sides with 1/4" thick pieces of sheet foam as well as adding handles on the sides to help in carrying it around.

The foam was glued tot he sides and hopefully today (Saturday) I will get it painted. I'm going with a dark forest green color, I think the dark color will help in taking your eyes to the layout. I want the sides to fade away so that they aren't really noticed. 

I added the "ice" to the pond yesterday. I think I'll go back over it one more time today with just a little bit more white pigment. It looks icy right now, but not thick enough to skate on, it needs to look "thicker". After I add that layer and it dries, I'll lightly dust it with snow and it should give me the look I'm after. Before I do the snow dusting I'll go ahead and add the skaters. I have 7 little people with ice skates, and I think I'll have 4-5 on the pond with a couple standing at the edge watching. 

I added a little pile of wood for a campfire and have a few people standing around it. I have a plan to make the fire look like a fire, but it probably won't happen on this first go around. Woodland Scenic's makes some "Just Plug" nano LED's that flash. My plan is to drill a hole underneath the pile of wood, and secure the LED's about 1/2" below the surface. I would then cover the hole with a flat piece of foam with a small hole that's maybe 1/8" and put the wood back on top. If the plan works, the flashing LED's would appear to be coming from the wood and the random flashing would look like fire. We'll see. 🙂

Once the water part is done, I'll go back and add more snow all around the edges of the pond as well as the rest of the park, right now there isn't much there and it looks a little out of place with the rest of the diorama. 

I also took some random pictures today. Since I'm been moving the diorama around, some of my little people that haven't been glued down have fallen over. 🙂 They'll just have to lay there until the end. 

Also, I would not use these fall deciduous trees on a winter layout again, and at some point I will replace them with trees that I've made. These were pre made using a poly fiber product that is like a carpet. When I added the snow and Scenic Cement, it made the poly fiber sag once it was wet. To me, they just don't look like real trees.  Next time I'll buy the armatures (the woody part of the tree) and glue my own "leaves" on the branches. I've already got a stack of these armatures so it's just a matter of getting some fall foliage to glue on them. It's kind of funny, but when I got started I decided NOT to make trees and just go the easy route and buy the pre-made trees. And don't get me wrong, there are different levels of pre-made trees and some are very nice, but also very expensive. I think you are better off buying pre-made evergreen trees due to the density of the plant material. There are also varying levels of quality for these trees as well, and I have about 3-4 different qualities on this layout.

If you ever decide to try to build a diorama, you'll find yourself doing more and more from scratch instead of using the pre-made materials, trying to make it look as realistic as possible. 

Pictures are in this album.

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