Thanks very much!
The static grass was actually a lot easier than I remembered it being from when I've done it in the past. I used a very simple Gaugemaster plastic bottle I bought maybe two or three years ago (amazingly, I've not had to refill it in that time!): the grass gets its static-ness (there must be a proper word for that) just by shaking the bottle.
I might try that soil dust technique - could be quite useful to fill in some of the gaps around the edges too. I haven't bothered hoovering up the excess as it looks good enough as it is really!
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I finally got around to starting work on the final building for the top left-hand corner of the layout yesterday. It's a pair of terraced houses, and the kit's been sitting around for ages. Here's the finished result:
View attachment 101834
I've tried to vary the look a bit by adding a porch for one house and the bay windows for the other, as well as adding different amounts of greenery for either half. The left house here has less greenery than the right.
The greenery up by the chimney serves a useful purpose - that being to hide the gap between the roof and chimney itself:
View attachment 101835
The gates are quite nice - they're laser-cut and finish the look of the front off nicely:
View attachment 101836
Now you might be able to see in that photo that the bay window doesn't actually look straight into the inside of the building. In fact, the bay window is simply a façade (triple word score) - it's simply been attached to the front of the building:
View attachment 101837
The upper bay window is a bit better as it's got some curtains to hide the reality of what's going on:
View attachment 101838
And finally, here's the building on the layout:
View attachment 101839
It's not a perfect fit, but it's close enough. The kit comes with three different ways of 'paving' the front - a set of self-adhesive slabs (also available in a separate pack, from which I have three further sheets), the sheet I've used, and another sheet to mimic cobblestone paving. I used this paving because I'm trying to save the self-adhesive slabs for the rest of the layout (although I expect I'll have to buy more anyway).
In other news, I bought some new stuff for the layout today. The main thing is actually five sheets of grey card for the roads on the layout (thanks @Cowley for that suggestion!). I also picked up a corrugated sheet of card in brown, with the intention of maybe making some small allotments out of it, as well as three new craft-knives to help with kit-building (the one I'd been using was bought on holiday about three years ago and it's good, but not amazing). Finally got some of that Tamiya masking tape too, so that should be helpful when I finally get around to painting some more engines.
Thanks for reading
-Peter
I’m a bit short of reception this weekend but it’s coming along well now. I like the houses.