The primary center structure of National Cold Storage is fairly straightforward to build being essentially an exercise in creating a sheet and strip styrene cube. I have to give some more thought to what I want to do with the shorter brick structures that flank it on each side. In the mock up it’s taking on a larger footprint than I might want.
Our hobby is a visual one. It’s hard to overemphasize the power the camera lens gives us in terms of allowing us to experience our work in a way that is simply impossible with the naked eye. The only limits are our own imagination. When we are lucky enough to hit the mark photographically, the payoff is that of being transported to the time and place we’ve worked so hard to create in miniature.
To create a shot like the one above we need to have a strategy going in. There are two pillars that make up the foundation of what you see above. First, the camera angle needs to be low in order to create the sense of mass that is so captivating about our subjects. Trains and ships are huge, our models are not. (The N scale boxcars in the photo above are only three inches long). The advent of exceptional smartphone cameras opens up an entirely new world from the standpoint that you can get the lens so much lower than with the a traditional SLR. Strategy 1, use a smartphone. Second, it’s all about the lighting. In order for a shot to “snap” you need contrast. That means using photo floods NOT diffuse flourescents or room lighting. For most shots I use just one photo flood.
The final step of creating the image is some touch up. Blemishes, dust specks, minor modeling errors, etc. were lightly cleaned up with the clone tool. I bumped the saturation up just a hair (10 on the slider bar).
With experience we all learn that certain details just aren’t practical to model so be liberal in applying the old adage, “no detail is better than a crude or bad detail”. Guy wires and flags are no goes. If you try to model them, the eye will immediately key in on the fact that your subject is a model. To get around this, I photoshopped both in. The guy wires on the mast were edited in using the lines tool (medium gray not black). The drooping flag on the back was found on the net, sized appropriately, and cropped in.
This one image took about a half day to create but to me it’s worth it to have something you can enjoy looking at for many years into the future.
Built in 1953 the USS Carronade is a little too new for a WW2 era layout but it’s the perfect size and is at least plausible. At 1:170 Lindberg’s kit is pretty darn close to N scale. The most challenging part of the project was “waterlining” the hull so it would sit flat.
The light gray of a naval warship doesn’t really contrast very well against light gray warehouses. It is what it is.
The final structure this year will be National Cold Storage. When that’s done, I want to double back and do some tuning and detail work. Since the prototype is pretty massive, I’ll need to do some selective compression. To dial in the best composition and sizing I printed out some photos of the prototype as well as a photo of the Atlas Middlesex kit. It’s far easier and faster to do it this way than with a kit.
I used the size of the prototype relative to it’s neighbors as a guide. Note that NCS doesn’t tower above the surrounding structures. Since the three warehouses on the layout are only four stories tall, I want to make sure not to exceed that.
The General Ship Repair structure is now complete and occupying its spot on the pier. Once the core and the photo wallpaper editing was done, the rest of the structure was fairly straightforward. The only tricky part was dulling down the gloss photo paper without getting a frosty haze in the process. Through trial and error I found that an acrylic dulling spray (Krylon) applied in three or four light coats did the trick. Dullcote didn’t work with this ink and paper combo. With photo wallpaper always test the dulling process on test samples as every ink type reacts differently. With some Dullcote is fine, with others you get frostiness or a color change. Next on the project list detailing the pier.
