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.
The roof covers a lot of surface area so special attention needed to be given to getting the coloring right. The base material was Evergreen car siding.
In terms of coloring the order of application was:
-First, the entire surface was painted with Rustoleum light gray primer and allowed to dry overnight
-The next day the entire surface was given a wash of burnt umber artist oils and mineral spirits using vertical strokes. An effort was made to work in vertical streaks. Again, I let this dry overnight.
-I wanted subtle horizontal bands to imply edges to the corrugated metal sheeting so I applied masking tape on the surface and lightly dusted the tape edge with an India Ink/alcohol mix in my airbrush (2 tsp ink/pint). Once I had three noticeable horizontal bands I went over the entire surface again with a dusting of the ink/alcohol mix.
-I masked off a few random panels and painted them either dark gray or light gray primer.
-Finally, I used a mix of brown and rust chalk to add streaks to the lighter panels.
The back side of the roof peak won’t be visible so as I worked I always started the paint steps there to make sure a technique would work before moving to the more visible front side.
Building flats serve a useful operational role when it comes to representing an industry. However, they tend to break down visually when you can’t see most of the structure side. On occasion I’ll get around this by installing small shelf on the fascia so you can add more depth to the structure while still maintaining aisle widths for the most part. Make sure you extend the shelf a little beyond the length of the building for photographic purposes.
