Thanks for all the kind words.
I'm much more comfortable working with wood, so it's been fun to play with styrene.
A lot of the fine-motor stuff and prep work is me, but the kids do do a lot on the layout (haha I said "do do").
Like the buildings: My daughter glued the sections I cut together. They dried. My daughter spray-painted the base coat. It dried. My son splashed greyish wash all over. It dried. My daughter & I painted some doors & window sills. Dried. I touched up around the doors and windows. Dried. My son splashed weathering stain from the "Big Jug O' Stain" all over. Dried. I CA'ed the flats to the backboard. Dried. Tah-dah!
At some point though, I would like to see my daughter build her own so I can just move to the advisor role (like Dr. Dave is doing with his son). Would be good for her sense of ownership.
After this project, I guess!
Soooooo.....
The globs of white glue have dried, so here's the other end of the left section we worked on.
Mainly installing backdrop photos, flats, fence and doing some ground cover, bushes & (small) trees:
[The hinge at the upper right behind the gon will be covered by a removeable power house]
When trying to put some static grass on, we put the white glue down, then tried to push the grounding T-pin for our fly-swatter static grass applicator.
Took about 3-4 hard pushes to remember we used MDF, not pink foam, on this layout.
D'oh!
So just sprinkled it on with our hands, rolling it with our fingers whle letting it fall onto the white glue.
A few passes with the vacuum got some to stand up, but otherwise it turnout out ok:
At first the slightly-diluted white glue dried very shiny, to the point you could see the edges of the glue!
We took a tooth brush, dipped in dirt and scrubbed the grass.
This seemed to tone it down.
Then we sprinkled a little more dirt & "weed" fine ground foam around & through the grass area, then re-wetted with booze and diluted white glue.
That seemed to blend the grass, dirt & foam a bit better.
Here's the whole backdrop scene so far:
And here's a closeup of the photo-flat industry with gravel road and fence:
Was thinking of putting a photo of an aircraft carrier in there, but a bit cheezy (& already had the navy planes down at the other end), and I liked the color / contrast to the nearby brick structures.
Still need to build the oil-transfer shed and set up the oil storage tanks, but otherwise the left side of the layout is moving along pretty well.
Thanks for looking.
