So it has really been ages since I made a decent post about things. I think I will rectify that today. I'd like to post a bit about all the scenery I have been working on for my little module. Since this is now complete I'm going to go over it rather quickly in just one post. First I'll start with a quick picture of my test fit of all the structures I planned to use. I used some miscelaeous items to stand in for trees and some buildings are just pieces leaning together to help me plan out the space. Honestly I think I redid this process several times as the buildings took shape and I began to have better understanding of how to utilize the space. Next time I'll probably make cardboard cutouts of the footprint of each building to start with as that would have been easy to keep taped to the foam while I was working on the track.
Once the celluclay goop mixture was good and dry I began adding paint and ground foam to the layout. I think I did this step too early actually, some of the buildings weren't ready yet, and in all honesty the track needed a lot of work still, but that's another post. Here are two shots, one of the church area and one of the whole module with it's ground foam in place.
The ground foam is a mixture of Wood Scenics and Life Like greens and dry/dead grass with some sifted sand mixed in in some areas. The still unfinished road way is actually cardstock that I printed on my printer and glued to the layout. It came from http://www.scalescenes.com a site that I highly recommend. Even if you don't want to use card stock buildings (which you should consider using anyway) The add ons like interior carpet and paintings are worth it.
Finally here is a picture taken after the trees were added to the hill and station area. This is looking down from the hillside onto the rest of the layout. The tree bases are not yet sceniced, I'll probably paint them and put some additional ground foam around them to conceal them a bit more. That's about it for today, I'll try and get some more up soon. On a side note I did have this module out and running this Christmas. I didn't have it under the tree it actually sat on a cabinet on the far side of my fireplace, but looking back at last years post about "Being Happy with what you have/an N-Scale under the tree" I felt it important to note that West Forge itself was my families Christmas tree train display. The kids enjoyed it quite a bit as did I.
