Next Project: Kitbashed Clever Models Caboose into Railcar

I decided my next project should be an HOn30 whimsical railcar. (It'll just be stationary.) I'm kitbashing together the following three things:

1.  A Jordan Highway Miniatures Model T Ford stake-bed pickup truck,
2.  A Clever Models caboose,
3.  Some N Scale wheels I had from another project.

Here's my mockup, just to get some of the sizes and proportions the way I want them.

I always like to use bogus train line names, and "Shamrock" has been a recurring word in my work, so I made a new logo for the Shamrock Island Line. (After all, it's not the REAL Rock Island Line!)

Here are some of my other bogus signs and logos...

My take on the old AT&T logo.

Obviously based on the Nickle Plate Road logo...

Ceci N'es Pas Une Billboard

I came across this odd billboard on a Portland history blog the other day...

Corner of NE Union (now MLK Blvd) & NE Sacramento Street, 1929.

(Via the Portland Archives and Records Center)

It's got a typical 1920s billboard frame, but that frame is simply painted onto the shiplap on the building. Naturally, I wanted to make one to put on a model building someday, so here's my take on it, dropped onto a Clever Models white shiplap background.

For reference, I used the perspective tool in GIMP to straighten out the photo. I took the frame from a print ad for billboards, and fooled around with fonts to get a fair approximation of the original. (I swiped the colors from that print ad, too.) I altered the circle quite a bit by using different fonts, then rotated it a bit to jazz the design up a little. Once I had everything nailed down the way I wanted it, I used some of my GIMP tricks to make the sign appear to be recently painted on the Clever texture.

After I finished, I zoomed in on a higher resolution version of the original, and realized the original graphic designer put a clock face in the bottom of the 15, with fifteen minutes of the hour highlighted.

By the way, about the lettering for "FURNITURE EXCHANGE"; I just spent about $30 for "Show Biz JNL" by Jeff Levine. I'd been hunting for that font for quite a while, and there's no freebie version of anything close to it. It's a really good approximation of "Bulletin Board Thick and Thin Letters" as seen in The Expert Sign Painter, and variations on this typeface turn up in a lot of signage from that era.

From The Expert Sign Painter, 1922.

Levine's "Show Biz"

UPDATE: Looking closely at more of the pictures on the Vintage Portland blog, I see that these flat billboard frames were a thing... in Portland, at least; I've never run into them before...

Also, while looking for images of workers putting up billboards, I came across a Jam Handy film on Archive.org, To Market, To Market, which was very boring, but had a LOT of information about period billboards.

Gorre & Daphetid diorama in N Scale, Pt 1

I just started working on a diorama based on the Cross Junction / Corsa area of John Allen's Gorre & Daphetid railroad. I bought the plans from Silver Ridge Modelworks. It's available as either an HO-scale laser-cut kit, or you can just purchase the instructions and the templates, and build it yourself from scratch in whatever scale you want. My plan is to take the templates and apply Clever Models textures with The GIMP to make an N scale version of the depot, and install it in a diorama which is similar to the original G&D scene.

Here is the diorama suggested by Silver Ridge...

...and here is how the station looked in the original G&D setting.

You can see that Allen had a tunnel perpendicular and under the upper track. I decided to put that in.

I threw together a quick, corrugated and chipboard dummy in three dimensions to see what the proportions might look like. This gives me some planning flexibility, because I can move the station around, and I'll have an idea what works and what doesn't.

This is what it looked like after a couple hours.

I converted the measurements for the diorama down to N from the Silver Ridge plans, but when I got to the station, I used no measurements at all -- I just hacked away at the chipboard and slathered the edges with Aleene's Tacky Glue. If someting was too big, I chopped it off. If it was too small, I tore it off and made a bigger piece. It's a bit like sketching with a pencil and erasing whatever looks wrong. It's a lot of fun, and the whole process only took a couple hours. Possibly 90 minutes. I'm having trouble estimating the time spent, because I was "in the zone" the whole time.

The following evening, I threw together a very rough cityscape, similar to the G&D original, but a little more urban. I'll use forced perspective to fit that skyline in the very limited space, and the buildings in the front may need to be a little smaller than N scale.

Overhead shot.

I can already see I'll have to lower the skyline about 1/2 to 3/4 of an inch, because I don't like the proportions. Also, I'll modify that cross street so the back of it is hidden a bit better.

The upper deck of this should have a streetcar, while the lower station will provide passenger and freight service.

Stay Puft Ghost Sign

I saw the original Ghostbusters a couple days ago, and noticed a very subtle joke for the first time. In an nearly subliminal bit of foreshadowing, one of the shots shows a faded Stay Puft Marshmallow ad painted on the side of a building.

It's the second building on the left in the foreground.

I needed a break from the Gorre engine house, so I threw together a similar sign in The Gimp.

I went for a 1950s look, because I figured that was when Ray Stantz grew up. The sign in the movie looks a bit more 1930s, with a fatter version of Mr. Stay Puft. The slogan, "Stay Puft, Even When Toasted!" was apparently part of the original script, but it was cut out, and only appears in the film on the matte painting.

I'm tucking this away for future use.

N Scale Lighthouse build, continued

Finished the roof this morning. The gable isn't a great fit, but the flaws are under the soffit... so, "F" it.

I put the coin battery into the underside of the carved pink foam base. For the moment, this works pretty well -- the foam presses the wires from the LED into the battery nicely. In the long term, I'll be able to pull the leads down and work them into layout wiring.

Next: painting and landscaping the pink foam.

N Scale Cape Disappointment Lighthouse

My interest in the Ilwaco Railway & Navagation Company led me to building the lighthouse at Cape Disappointment. It shares with the railroad similar stories of North Coast incompetence: the tower was built first, but when the lamp lenses arrived, they were too big. It took two years for the tower to be rebuilt to fit the lenses. However, when the lighthouse was finally completed, it couldn't be seen by ships approaching from the North, and a second lighthouse was erected two miles away at North Head.

Oh, and the fog bell couldn't be heard over the rain and surf. Apart from that, Mrs. Lincoln...

I started out with a downloaded kit from Fiddler's Green ($4.95). FG models are often a decent starting point -- most of the geometries are already figured out for me, and I can usually modify what's there to make it more accurate... or more to my liking, anyway.

My first step was to alter the textures a bit. I opened the files in The Gimp, then used some roof tiles from Clever Models and surface textures from Dave Graffam Models, and overlaid them on the appropriate parts to replace the the cartoon-y colors of the FG kit. Then I reduced all the parts down to N scale and printed them on matte photo cardstock.

There are a few inaccuracies on the FG model. The cone shape goes through the lower walkway and all the way up to the bottom of the upper walkway, while on the real tower, the lamp house continues down through both walkways. I chopped off the top of the tower and fabricated a new lower lamp house from black cardstock. Also, the FG roof is roughly the shape of a Chinese sun hat, while the actual roof is more of a dome.

I built the lamp house first and worked my way down. I knew from the start I wanted to have a light in this, so I poked two pinholes into the center of the upper walkway and inserted an amber LED. By coincidence, a typical LED is about the same size, in N scale, as a lighthouse lamp. Soldering the leads to wires was tricky because the paper bits were so close, but it worked out okay. I added some heat-shrink tubing to prevent the leads from short-circuiting.

I still have the smaller work room and mud room to finish, but that's really straight-ahead model building.

Water Tank on N Scale Machine Shop

I'm moderately happy with how this turned out -- the supports are a little cattywampus, but they're pretty good for N scale.

I modified some of the support parts using the GIMP. The original model had the L-shaped support pieces as two separate pieces to be glued together, and there was absolutely no way that would work at this scale.

This model will be done in the next couple of days. Almost all the sub-assemblies are finished, except for a simple side building and a vent or two. It should come together quickly once I finish those.

I brought this model along with me on a holiday trip, and stashed all the finished parts in a small box in my carry-on luggage. Card models are tougher than you might think!

Ghost Signs for Cardstock Models using The Gimp

Inspired by the Fading Ad Blog, I tried my hand at creating a couple ads to drop onto a Clever Models texture sheet.

 

The Harold Lloyd sign on the top may seem unlikely -- why have a painted sign for a movie that might only run a few weeks? -- but it is based on an actual sign re-discovered a few years ago in Vancouver, B.C. when another building was torn down.

Seems the theater owner knew a building was going up and decided he could splash out with a painted sign. I changed a few things like the theater name and some colors, but I tried to match the fonts fairly closely.

 The second is my very liberal interpretation of an actual sign; the real sign used much less decorative fonts. This is always a decision you get to make when you're designing -- do I want it to look authentically old-time, or should I go for more of a modern idea of what "old-timey" is supposed to look like? Generally, the past was less fancy than we think, but sometimes I throw reality to the wind, because I like to fool around with fonts.

Here is how they look when I drop them on top of the Clever Models texture and lower the opacity of the sign layer.

 If I'm modeling a later era, I can lower the opacity still more to simulate further fading.

I got to fooling around with this, and decided I wanted to create the effect of a recently painted wall, which would make sense with that Harold Lloyd sign, since it was only supposed to be visible for a short time. Creating this effect is tricky using this technique -- by the time you drop the opacity just enough to see the wall (around 75% to 80%) you've created the illusion the paint has faded for quite a number of years.  But it's not impossible. The first step of the workaround is this:

(1) Copy two parts of the brick background that correspond to the areas covered by the painted signs, and (2) paste them as a new layer. Then (3) desaturate the colors to bring them down to greyscale, (4) invert them to make the dark areas light and light areas dark, and finally (5) adjust the brightness and contrast to make the shadows really pop.

Now when you make the translucent sign layer visible on top of this "white paint," it causes the the whites and light colors appear freshly painted, but you can still see a brick texture through them.

Naturally, all this works with Photoshop, too.