Deep seeing the pasture

Despite finding a good pasture last summer, I remain drawn to an even nicer one that Barbara White shared on Flickr, and which I wrote about earlier last year. There is nothing quite like trying to reproduce something to make you look at it deeply, and as I’ve done only enough scenery modelling to know […]

Pursuing the Perfect Pasture

We just returned from a week of visiting family in Ontario – the first visit in two years. Because the family is too large to fit in any one of our houses, we usually rent a large cottage and stay there. This year, it was on Big Rideau Lake, near Westport. Aside from a trip […]

Burnstown Road Farm

For several years, one of my background tasks has been to look for inspiration for the scene beyond the roundhouse. I took a whole lot of pictures on our cross-Canada tour in 2018, but never found exactly what I was looking for, which is a pasture with a hill. These are important to tell the […]

Testing a new toy

My brother likes to get gifts that he would like to play with himself. So, when he learned that there is such a thing as static grass, well guess what I received for Christmas. I painted up a square of Styrofoam that has been lurking in a corner of the garage for half a decade […]

Inspiration for the spaces between

My recollection of August in Ontario is of a landscape weary of the summer’s heat and sun, but desperate to hold on rather than giving in to the autumn that is just around the corner. I remember the seed heads of ochre grass bobbing against my thighs as they launched grasshoppers whose wings flashed briefly […]

The Muskrat River gets safe for swimming

It seems like years ago that I went through the ordeal of smoothing out the Muskrat River. In fact it was only five months. After spending three weeks filling and sanding and priming and sanding and painting, it didn’t read like water. I wasn’t happy with it. Rick Sutton and Mark Dance suggested that I […]

A touch of paint

There is a truism in modelling that the surface is all anyone sees. So, in preparation for a visit from the North Shore Model Railroaders, I quickly dabbed some paint on all the blue foam insulation. The paint is Rona recycled “Clay,” which is a pretty close match for the gravel ballast. Suddenly the scenery stops […]

The Consistency of Oatmeal

After years of hearing about it, I decided to give Lou Sassi’s ground goop a try. I found a few online resources with the recipe, including a video on the Model Railroader site, with Lou himself mixing it up. The recipe I found was one part Cellulite one part fine vermiculite one part dirt-coloured paint […]

Pembroke’s River is Finished (for now)

I’ve declared the river to be finished from now. Does it look like a river? Well, from sufficiently low angles, it reflects mostly sky, and almost succeeds. However, the sky is not as bright as a real sky, and so, the river is not as bright as a real river. The kids both say it […]

Liquitex Spray on the Muskrat River

After five coats of paint or primer, filling and sanding in between, I finally felt ready to place the finish coats. These are all going to be sprayed in the hopes that I don’t have to sand between coats (time will tell). My darling wife looked at the river and declared that it was too […]