In August I wrote about the caricature trap, caricature being a treatment that has an “amped up”, contrived, “model railroady” look to it. There’s no shame in that…..as long as it’s intentional….as long as it something you enjoy looking at. Often though it’s not intentional, and that’s where it’s time to take a pause and […]
The cleaner the presentation of our layout, the more buy-in we get from family members….and ourselves. Shown above is a “current status” photo of the East Rail layout showing its floating bench work. There’s nothing that complicated going on. The bench work itself is sixteen inches wide and comprised of hollow core door slabs (The […]
The smoother we can make the transitions from one color to the next, the less defined the boundary lines, the better subjects such as scenery and structure weathering will look. One of the most important steps in improving a specific modeling skill, and it’s a hard one, is recognizing the subject is something that deserves […]
Victoria Embankment, London. G.De Nittis. Last weekend I attended a lecture at the Phillips on the work of Italian impressionist Giuseppe De Nittis (more well known in Europe than the US). On the panel were two art historians and two museum curators, all excellent speakers. They’d put up a slide of a piece of work […]
No matter how much of a prototype modeler we’d like to say we are, the reality of our limited space is such that everything we do is ultimately somewhere on the “proto-freelance” spectrum. Since we can’t copy actual scenes exactly, decisions need to be made with respect to composition. One of the key principles of […]