Trail's End - another microscene

While sorting all my bits and pieces I came across an old plastic model of a cart. I felt this could be the basis of a little scenic interlude so pulled out a small piece of plywood and set to. I had a bit of car body filler going spare so did a bit of quick terraforming and then set to work giving the ground some basic cover. The rest is pretty self explanatory - just working in ground foam, rocks and plants etc.

The plywood base and the cart bits

Basic ground cover with a suggestion of an old carriage road

The finished article.

Attention to detail......

A bit like Mr Sellios I tend to use up detail castings etc at a rate of knots. For years my unfinished details have been nagging at me to attend to them and being limited by my wrist issues I decided to kill a few birds with one stone.

1. Unearth all those bits of scrap that can be made into industrial clutter and empty all my little boxes and bags with castings/unfinished small kits etc.
2. Clean up, assemble, prime and paint and store them all where I can get at them easily.
3. This frees up no end of space for completed details, bulks up my usable details boxes and makes me feel better.

Result!

The first tranche gets the primer treatment

Barrels, sack trucks, luggage etc

Mainly plastic odds and ends and kit bits

Detailed microscene

With an hour to spare and idle hands I decided to make a miniature scene with as much unpaid for scrap as I could.  I found a picture on Google images that said "Do it" so I used that as inspiration. 

I can't reproduce the scene exactly but wanted to get its flavour. First I made some tanks from the brass barrel of an old promotional pen. I cut them to size with a mini plumber's pipe tool. 

Then I filled the ends with car body filler. 

 I shaped that with a sanding block.

 Next I made some rivet strips using paper and an old bradawl. I wasn't looking for scale accuracy here - just the suggestion so did the rivets freehand.  The rivet strip was glued round the tanks with white glue.  

I used a small square of styrene as a base and added sprue and stuff from my piping scrapbox and some Ratio (UK) pipe fittings to join the tanks up and added any old plastic grot that I came across, it was all going to be rusty and rotting anyway.  

The whole thing was sprayed with a textured sand coloured paint and then I went to town with various acrylic paints to effect a rust finish.  Grasses and weeds completed the look and now it's ready to drop on the layout.

Photograped under LEDs this came out somewhat redder than it actually is