Morning gang!
How's things? Hope you've had an amazing week… No internet outages this week, which is nice. And it's been work experience week, so we've had Thomas from St Austell working with us this week, learning the ropes in all the different departments within SMS HQ.
He spent Monday down on the shopfloor with myself, Tina & Scott, learning how to pack up kits as Scott brought them out of the laser room, pick orders with Tina and then check, pack and dispatch the orders ready for collection by the Royal Mail in the afternoon. He did an absolutely cracking job and learned the rope very quickly indeed!
Then we spent Tuesday doing a couple of custom jobs for you guys before starting work on his design project. He's probably the biggest Ghostbusters fan in the South West and brought with him a really nice 3D print of the New York Fire Station that they use in the film as Ghostbusters HQ. So we set about creating all the parts to build a diorama that he could use as to take photographs of diecast cars on.
Between us, with him driving our cad software and Photoshop and me giving a bit of guidance over his shoulder… fueled by plenty of tea and biscuits (thank you for those Thomas!), we created all the parts he needed to create a realistic street scene.
Stu stepped in then on Friday morning (as Tina and I are guess where? Back in the midlands again for a couple of days...) with some practical model making guidance to bring all the parts together into a completed diorama board which he could take home at the end of his week. Overall, I think he had an enjoyable week and got a really good understanding of the work that goes into creating our kits… I think he was surprised at just how much manual editing has to be done to get everything looking just right.
Apart from that, it's been business as usual… Jess is busy setting up more behind the scenes systems to help with the newsletter and the website. Scott's been flying around the laser room keeping a steady flow of kits coming out onto the shopfloor. Carl & Klaire have been taking care of packing everything up and getting it into the stock drawers for Tina, while Sam's been getting his Speilberg head on and shooting some video content for YouTube. And when he's not been helping Thomas with his diorama, Stu's been loading the N gauge Peco Track onto the website… So it's all go, getting ready for the autumn season. Which judging by how chilly it was yesterday morning when we went out with the dog, and how early it gets dark on an evening now, won't be far away!
New Product Development
In between everything else, there's not been a lot of time to work on much apart from a few texture sheets which will be hitting the website very shortly. Hopefully if this is the last time we have to come up to the midlands for a few weeks, we can get some solid creative time in over the next few weeks.
In the meantime, it's over to young Sam for this weekend's videos.
Good morning! Last week, I mentioned that it's feeling a bit more like summer. However, as I'm writing this, it's looking pretty grey and we have had a weekend of high humidity and lots of mizzle. I hope you've had a good week. At the moment I'm working on some period interior textures as well as some accessories. This has been interesting as I'm discovering a lot of old packaging, newspapers and other bits and pieces. Seeing photos from the 1950s and 60s is fascinating.
There have been some excellent photos of the recent S034-OO Welcome To Village / Town Signs which I released not long ago, keep them coming. Also, please keep sending in any photos you have that feature our kits. These are good to have in many ways, including the catalogue, social media posts and for our enjoyment! I love seeing the brilliant modelling you come out with.
Another quick thing I want to mention is to keep an eye out for new YouTube videos from us! We are putting together some ideas and these should be coming out weekly.
Quickly before we jump into the usual programming, Dawn Quest has released the second episode of her Ladykillers Layout series so go to her channel to check that out.
Anyway, that's enough waffling from me, time for some videos!
How To Paint Realistic Figures
The first video comes from George Williamson who has been consistently uploading quality modelling content for the last few years. He has many brilliant videos, including painting tracks, building platforms, constructing locos, etc. In this video, he covers his techniques to achieve highly realistic figures. For the figures themselves, he uses ModelU - a brilliant brand which I'm sure many, many of you know by now.
I don't want to spoil the video too much but to give you a quick run down, he begins with a grey car primer which he then adds pre-shadows by spraying black from below and white from above. He then adds the skin colour, followed by the clothing. Once he is happy with this, he goes and adds a thinned black wash to highlight the creases and add some “texture”.
George provides some funny voice-over (except the part where he says he is a cat person and not a huge fan of dogs). It's worth checking this video out if you are serious about painting figures. Also, if you want to check out some other talented model figure painters, Mudmagnet, Simon Cox and gregorybrown06 (Greg) are all in the club and post some brilliant stuff.
London Underground and Nuclear Bunkers?
For the next video this week, we have a returning channel - Jago Hazzard. A couple of Newsletters ago, I featured his video about The Trains of The London Underground and you seemed to enjoy it. His channel is full of interesting videos but I saw this get released and wanted to show it to you. In this video, Jago goes over the rumours about The Underground featuring nuclear bunkers. It's interesting how he highlights brutalist architecture and how many people associate that with this topic. Another part I found interesting was the fact people took cover in the tubes during the First and Second World Wars.
QI Discuss Model Railways
This video shouldn't be taken seriously (I'm guessing most of you know that anyway) but in this, the topic of model railways comes up on the show QI. If you are reading this Newsletter I'm assuming you've seen or at least heard of QI, it is a comedy panel game quiz show. Anyway, it's interesting to see them talk about the hobby. You can't have model railways mentioned in mainstream media without someone bringing up Rod Stewart! I did learn something interesting from this, West Ashfield training facility - this is where staff go to be trained for the London Underground.
Hoveton Model Railway Exhibition 2024
Finally, we have a bit of Exhibition Coverage for you! This video comes from NorfolkNGauge. The exhibition took place on Sunday the 21st of July 2024 and was hosted by the 32A Model Railway Club in the Hoveton Village Hall, Norfolk. NorfolkNGauge has done an excellent job with this video, there's nothing wrong with the longer exhibition videos but at 12 minutes, he gets some brilliant shots of the layouts and keeps the pace steady throughout the video. At this event, there were layouts in OO, O, N and 009 gauge. If I had to pick my favourite layout, it would be the first layout featured “New Cut” in OO Gauge.
For up-and-coming exhibitions, you can click here.
And with that, my section comes to an end. I hope you enjoyed the selection of videos! As always, feel free to let me know what you think about them in the comments or by email (sam@scalemodelscenery.co.uk). Have a great rest of your weekend and let's hope for a bit of sunshine.
New Stuff
We're going to skip this section for this week, but we do have plenty of new scenic products to share with you next week from Sarah, our tuft, flower & minerals lady. She's been working hard on some really nice mineral blends for us that were originally done for a diorama build by Dan Evason which is going to appear in Hornby Magazine very soon. The pots of this brilliant new thing were delivered by Sarah & Steve on Tuesday and are just waiting for me to create the product labels, get some photos taken and get them live on the site.
Bundles, Bundles, Bundles…
We've been wanting to get more bundles sort and up on the site to make it easier for you to choose kits for particular scenes on your layout… So Sam has put together these two for you this week:
- Beach Bundle - OO/4mm/1:76
Building a beach or coastal scene? Here's a handful of kits that can help you bring the whole scene to life… Look out for more beach related stuff next week too!
- Road Works & Construction Bundle - OO/4mm/1:76
Create a Realistically Better construction scene on your OO gauge model railway layout or 1:76 scale diecast diorama with this great value construction bundle! Includes temporary traffic lights, water-filled barriers, road cones, temporary road signs and scaffolding!
Right, that's about it for this edition of the weekly news. We're off our with the dog for an hour, then popping over to see my mum & dad before whizzing back to Loughborough then up to Liverpool for an evening of 90's hard rock (much to Tina's chagrin) watching Mr Big supported by Living Colour! Bass heaven for me with Billy Sheehan, who I've followed ever since I saw Mr Big for the first time in 1992! And Doug Wimbish, a superbly talented player which a totally unique style!
Have an amazing weekend folks… And of course…
Keep on shunting…
Justin, Tina, Elizabeth, Lola & The Team
P.S. This weeks newsletter header comes from Rob over on the Railway Modellers community again. I know we featured one of Rob's photos last week, but this one caught my eye this week as I'm a sucker for a quarry layout. Reminds me of going into Bardon Hill Quarry where my dad was General Manager for many years… Happy days!
P.P.S. Missed a newsletter? You can read all of our recent newsletters online here.