I'm still waiting for the cork roll to be delivered so this weekend I thought i'd try my first ever effort at scratch building something. I have been scouring my books and the aerial photos to get views of the various small buildings by the turntable and sidings at the southern end of the station. I thought for my first effort i'd keep it simple. So I chose the small brick structure at the left of this picture.

I've used photoshop before but never Illustrator, in the past week or so i've been learning the basics so first step was to get the plan on the laptop. I have been intrigued by the Cameo Silhouette cutter although I haven't yet bought one, it's on my wish list. As I understand it you can import files from Illustrator into their software and the hardware is like a printer, except it has a small blade that can cut through plasticard / brick sheet. So i'll persevere and work my plans digitally. I printed it off in 1:76 scale (one brick course = 1mm).



Next I cut the outline of the building and stuck it onto 30thou Plasticard. The idea is to build a shell and then stick the brick sheet on. It didn't occur to me when I was elaborately cutting out the spaces for lintels and window sills in the Plasticard that it isn't necessery to do this very accurately, it's the brick sheet that actually needs to be cut accurately. Lesson one learnt.



Here are all the components (except the roof and chimney) cut out. There are probably many ways of doing what i'm doing here, and no doubt shortcuts and tips on what i'm doing wrong or the long way round. But i'm having a pleasant day figuring it out.



I very roughly cut out the brick sheet outline and trimmed it once it was stuck onto the Plasticard. I thought about how the walls would stick together and left an overlap in the brick sheet on one side of two joining walls so that I can file it down flush once it's all stuck.



This is about as far as I got today. I have some trimming to do and when it's all set i'll probably give it a clean up, file the corners flush, put a coat of "mortar" paint on it (Tamiya XF-55, deck tan). I have not seen any colour pictures of this building and I don't think from the light tone on the B&W pictures that it was the dark engineering blue brick, so i'll probably paint it in a lighter brick colour. TBC. After this i'll paint the window sills, lintels seperately before adding to the building etc and work out how i'm going to do the windows.

I also realised that although I have enough supplies to build a medium size city, I don't have any tile sheet.



Coat of half acrylic half thinners to give the mortar course.