Modelling an Italian village in N scale from scratch - part 1
2024/01/07
My first ever model railway blogpost! I’ve been at it for a while, but finally I’ve got something worth sharing: my first experiments with scratchbuilding.
In this hobby I’m finding out how great it is to design and build something completely by myself, and making plenty of mistakes in doing so. I’ve tried it before and got frustrated: painting carton caused it to curl, and cutting precise enough to create proper aligned straight walls. Going the lasercut way felt wrong, and colour printing looks to flat.
But talking to some really nice fellow hobbyists and the youtube channel Chandwell put me on, pardon the pun, the right track. In short: design in Inkscape, print in b/w on a sticky label sheet, put that on the card, cut using the printout, and then drybrush the 1mm in layers. Finally, a way that works for me.
Using classic lego pieces to make custom ‘clamps’ to align the parts when glueing them together:
In this first building, I worked outside in, all with 1mm card. Would it be solid enough to paint it with three of the four walls in place, drybrushing it thinly? Yes, it did. I was so glad, as I stumbled on this before.
Another advantage of drybrushing thinly: details from the underlying black/white laserprint remain visible. Perfoct for blinds and especially the doors, which I kept close to the prototype:
Well well well, that’s starting to look like something. Shall I also add interior lighting? Oh well, why not. I created three light chambers:
Then came the most difficult part, a suitable roof. The prototype has a complicated roof shape and I chose to keep it simpler for this first effort, it’s already tricky enough. The roof elements I’d drawn attached to the walls were not quite fitting but proved a good base to attach the proper roof elements on top of, drawn in Inkscape following the Chandwell Hipped Roofs tutorial. For the roof tiles I used Redutex texture foil:
I’m quite pleased how this came out. Chimneys and downspouts are still missing, as is a little green perhaps, to mask the rough edges. But if I squeeze my eyes I see an authentic Italian style house. This will certainly get a place on the layout.