In the South

[fast car]

Reinhard,

Painting a stripe on a building is pretty easy stuff and can be done without any bleeding under the tape. I have been using the Tamiya pin stripe tape for the actual edge tape and then use a 3M Painters Tape and overlap the pinstripe tape. The pin stripe tap has a decent grip but releases quite easily, but is the best edging tape for cutting a sharp clear paint edge.

The blue and yellow stripe was done about a year ago using an airbrush without any pinstripe tape. The key is to apply in several light coats from about 14 to 16 cm above the stripe. The area to be striped should be facing up only because there is less chance for the paint to wik under the tape. It is also a good idea to dilute your acrylic paint with alcohol instead of water. Since alcohol is the carrier medium for the paint, it dries very quickly upon contact.

[SRY]

Russ, good idea. I have some decal strips. No 1/2" wide but should be fine.

Gary, that would be a board like I had it at the blue whale. I want to mimic the painting on the wall like in this example:
(No, it will not work letter by letter, the outcome would be lousy)


And here is the real thing. The painting fills all over the wall. In both cases is it required to blend seamless what ever I put an the wall with the white wall.


This is my favorite!

Reinhard, have you ever thought about using decals for the artwork? Maybe you should contact Andreas Nothaft http://www.andreas-nothaft.de/ from Ludwigshafen, he is doing a lot of custom decals too.

[SP1]

Reinhard,
are you in a hurry? I need to do a little testing and maybe come up with a solution in a week or two...

[faraway]

Ok, so I have three topics related to the buildings
1. Artwork at the walls
There is no hurry. Jens, take all time you need if you have an idea that needs some time to develop. I will not "glue" the buildings to the layout within the next weeks or so
2. Stripes
I did the details like electric installation etc. of the walls to early. That makes working with masking tape a risky thing. I will try to do it with decals for safety reasons.
3. Weathering
Two less visible walls got a very soft weathering. I did not like it and gave the walls another layer of white from the spray can. It might be not perfect prototypical but the dull primer white gives me the perfect imagination of a white wall in the sun of southern California

[fast car]

Ok, so I have three topics related to the buildings
1. Artwork at the walls
There is no hurry. Jens, take all time you need if you have an idea that needs some time to develop. I will not "glue" the buildings to the layout within the next weeks or so
2. Stripes
I did the details like electric installation etc. of the walls to early. That makes working with masking tape a risky thing. I will try to do it with decals for safety reasons.
3. Weathering
Two less visible walls got a very soft weathering. I did not like it and gave the walls another layer of white from the spray can. It might be not perfect prototypical but the dull primer white gives me the perfect imagination of a white wall in the sun of southern California

Reinhard,

Did you try framing the 4 Seasons sign to eliminate the paper edge? Maybe a .020 square plastic tube border. I am using a .060 plastruct square tubing to border all my structures. This allows for a actual place for the building to set withing the border and I can remove the structure to scenic right up to the edge of the border.

Larry

[faraway]

...Did you try framing...

Larry, I did that before on various buildings. But that is not what I need for "Vernon-style" walls. Those guys paint all kind of figures and letters on the walls. I am searching for a method to print "anything" and get it on the wall "as if" it has been painted.

The first method that comes into my mind is to print it of transparent decal paper, put the decal on the wall and cover it with dull coat to match the white primer. That is expensive and the dull white primer on the wall is a poor underground for decals. Alternative would be to put the decal on the styrene and cover all the wall. Even bigger decals... not a good option.

[simonmoore]

Great layout & the buildings are brilliant

What size room is it built in because i eventually want to build something like this myself.

Thanks.

Simon.

[faraway]

Simon,
the room is 4 meters long. The north yard is 60cm wide, the south yard 30cm. The west and east sections are interconnections with hatches for the doors only. This four photos show the entire room at time when I started with the layout.

[fast car]

...Did you try framing...

Larry, I did that before on various buildings. But that is not what I need for "Vernon-style" walls. Those guys paint all kind of figures and letters on the walls. I am searching for a method to print "anything" and get it on the wall "as if" it has been painted.

The first method that comes into my mind is to print it of transparent decal paper, put the decal on the wall and cover it with dull coat to match the white primer. That is expensive and the dull white primer on the wall is a poor underground for decals. Alternative would be to put the decal on the styrene and cover all the wall. Even bigger decals... not a good option.

Another solution maybe to use photo editing software (Arc Soft) and (Adobe Photoshop Elements) and copy the entire side of the building, square it to remove any distortions and print it on matte photo paper. You would have to reduce it down to size to fit your structure, remove what you don't want and then cut it to fit the entire side wall. Lance Mindheim does this to get the exact look of the structure.

[SP1]

Kurt did that too. But as I understand it is too late for Reinhard, because he already added details to his structures

[faraway]

Hi there, it was not my intention to get the image of a prototype building or wall and put it on my model. Lance and Kurt did that and it looks great! But that requires to have the dimensions of the prototype in mind when you do the model.

It would be fine to get some artwork from the internet and transfer it to a wall and it looks like painted. That did work reasonable with the logo of BOBCO because the logo has a different color as the wall. The problem is to transfer artwork with a shape that does not permit to cut it out. In that case I have a white rectangle with some colored artwork that should fit seamless on the white wall.

ps. The P&M Zipper has a nice painted building but the homepage http://www.pmdistributor.com/ is lousy...nothing to get from.

pps. You know me, I do not seek for perfection... But is should not be to obviously look like paper glued on a wall

[shortliner]

I don't know how you can do them, but here are some examples
<!-- m --><a class="postlink" href="http://www.monumentalcity.net/ads/walls/eastouter.html">http://www.monumentalcity.net/ads/walls/eastouter.html</a><!-- m -->

[faraway]

I don't know how you can do them, but here are some examples
<!-- m --><a class="postlink" href="http://www.monumentalcity.net/ads/walls/eastouter.html">http://www.monumentalcity.net/ads/walls/eastouter.html</a><!-- m -->

Hi, that is another story or artwork (not the white letters on the black band). I did see the "how to do" some time ago. They print it on paper, fix the front side with dull code and then comes the trick. You put the paper with the face down on the table and start gently rubbing on the backside with a wet finger. If you do it carefully the paper will get thinner and thinner without breaking apart.
I did try that technique this afternoon for my walls. It did not work because the paper will not be perfect flat at the backside. You will not notice it on the structured brick wall but it looks ugly on the flat white wall. But the boarder of the paper did blend better because it is much thinner.

[Gary S]

On the 4 seasons sign, I would do it with clear decal film printed in a color printer. It isn't all that expensive. Instead of doing it as one huge sign, would probably do it in pieces to ease the installation. Maybe each row of text could be applied seperately.

[faraway]

... clear decal film printed in a color printer...

If no other/better solution can be found I will collect all the signs/artwork I would like to have and print them all together on one sheet. I think one page per layout is affordable
But there is another surprise. The companies with the most fancy artwork at the walls have the most boring web pages. Might be you spend the marketing budget either for wall painting or web design but not both.