Junction Farm (BESTTrains kits)

[deemery]

Looks good, Dave

It does get a nice "foundation buried in the ground" look. 

dave

[Rick]

Dave, the house went together nicely and looks great.
Interesting how you made the base for the house.
I like the way you put the house at an angle.
Looks good.

[Larry C]

Dave nice sub foundation work and the house looks really good. The architecture reminds me of the farmhouse my grandparents had many, many moons ago.

[Jerry]

Nice job Dave.  It should be a really nice scene.

Jerry

[deemery]

The foundation is a pair of good quality plaster castings.  (Russ Greene's work?)  Now my plywood sub-foundation was cut to match the footprint of those castings, but I realized my stone technique would work best if the foundation overhung the sub-foundation a bit.  I figured out the offset, took the sub-foundation to the table saw, and cut off about 3/16. 


Then I glued the plaster pieces to the sub-foundation.   The square on the right side makes sure the two pieces are aligned (to form a single face, once I patch the gap between the two pieces on the stone side.)

The next step will be to prime the mortar color (light grey).  When that's dry, I'll do the stone with sponges (that's why the overhang is needed).

You can see the start of the roof shingling in the background.

dave

[elwoodblues]

Dave,

Just catching up on your build and you're making great progress.  I like how you have built the foundation into the scenery and the fact that you're mounting the building on an angle to the barn.

[PRR Modeler]

The foundation looks great

[deemery]

Foundation is primed.  

My general pattern is to prime stone with the mortar color, and brick with the brick color.  Tomorrow I'll work on the stone pattern.  The glue sticks for the shingles also arrived today.

dave

[Yannis]

Nice work on the foundation Dave. Good idea on the priming, are you going to continue with drybrushing next on the stones?

[deemery]

When the mortar lines are deeply incised, it's easy to do the stonework.  I used a wedge shaped make-up sponge and a fan brush.

First step is to drybrush the primary stone color, here a grey with a bit of brown into it.  I dab the sponge into the paint, wipe most of it off on paper towel, and then lightly go over the stones both horizontally and vertically.  The idea is to get paint coverage across the stones, but not into the cracks    The stones on the right have been sponge-brushed, on the left are the primer grey.


The second coat was a brown.  Again I used the make-up sponge and made sure most of the paint was removed on the paper towel.  I lightly dab, rather than wipe across the stones.  The idea is to get random amounts of darker brown onto some of the stones. 


The third step uses a light grey/off white and the fan brush.  Again I remove most of the paint from the fan brush, and move this strictly top-to-bottom.  This picks up highlights on the top edge of the stones.  I also hit the corners. 


And that's it!   I'm doing granite foundations, so the color is pretty uniform.  If you're doing another more colorful set of stones, then do a couple more colors using the intermediate step, and also paint specific stones (using a Q-Tip, again drybrushing.)  The thing here is to get thin non-uniform colors on the stones. 

dave

[PRR Modeler]

The individual stones stand out nicely.

[Mark Dalrymple]

Looking good, Dave.

It's really nice looking stonework.

Cheers, Mark.

[deemery]

t's really nice looking stonework.

I'm pretty sure that's Russ Greene's stonework.  He's very good at carving the masters.  

I got the shingles glued on, but not trimmed.  I'll do that tomorrow.  The roof panels developed a bit of warp as I was applying the shingles (rewarp, I should say, from when I spray primed them.)  So I glued some 1/8" square bracing in place.  That's curing under weights overnight.  

dave

[Jerry]

Dave nice work on the stonework.

For sure that's Russ's stonework.

Jerry

[friscomike]

Dave, it's looking good.  The stonework is excellent.  Have fun, mike