not much

So not much has happened recently with the model. I finished painting all the roads grey, and I also finished putting in most of the sidewalks. There are still driveways and parking lots that need to be put in, but I would rather building those around the buildings than make the buildings around the parking lot. If I had to warp the shape of something, I would rather it be a parking lot than a building.

Speaking of buildings (have I used the word "building" enough? here, I will do it one more time... "building"), I did something dumb. It isn't as dumb as the time that I didn't have white sand to mix with the black sand, so I glued sugar to my model, and not quite as dumb not water proofing my model well enough before pouring the modeling water onto wet paint, but still pretty dumb. After making the first 3 buildings of many, I decided to see just how many "many" really is. Turns out, my model is going to have about 1,627 buildings on it. Maybe I will make "buildings" the word of the day. Any Peewee Herman fast out there? Any fans at all beside my mother, girlfriend, and Jake? Who are you, anyway, Jake?

So today I am going to try to make a few more complicated buildings (word of the day: ahhhh!) and I'll time myself to estimate how long the rest of this model will take… that is this thunderstorm ever stops and the power comes back on). I’m going to make the complicated houses as my test ones because I’m going to assume that it is a good average between a house with four walls and a roof (simple) and the shopping center with a dozen stores (complicated). I counted both of those examples as one building (ahhh!). Granted there are more houses than shopping malls (thank goodness), so maybe I will be pleasantly surprised by how fast the model goes. That would be nice.

Enjoy the photos.

PS: I feel sortta bad because my model looks nearly as done as it ever will when it's seen as a whole. The only difference between what it looks like now and what it will look like in 2 years is that the frames will be painted white (next weekend), there will be a pond or two and a river, and over a thousand buildings smaller than a monopoly house. The houses won't add much as a whole, and my camera is really terrible at photographing small things. Perhaps I'll get a new camera around the holidays. Mine was bottom of the line and being discontinued when I got it in 2005.

"As idle as a painted ship upon a painted ocean, water water everywhere... [and not] a drop to drink" ~Samuel Taylor Coleridge

- - - - - - - - As you can probably tell from my quote from the "Rime of the Ancient Mariner"... and the pictures above... I put the water down. And when I say "water water everywhere," I mean it. What a mess. I need to make more sure next time I do this that everything is water proof. Well, I'm skipping ahead. Let me start from the beginning.

I went to Michael's and got blue paint for the lake. Seneca lake is the third deepest lake in the United States (after Crater Lake, and Lake Tahoe), which means that it is a dramatically different color in the middle than it is on the edges. In my opinion, the edges of the lake or more grey than blue, and I spent a while arguing with my mother that I should not paint the lake sapphire, but we eventually compromised on a navy for the middle most part of the lake and a true blue for the edges. Applying the paint wasn't much of an issue, it actually looked really nice, but I was impatient and don't have a picture of it to show you. In fact, I was so impatient that a half hour after I finished painting, I poured the water on top of it. That was when everything hit the fan. The water became cloudy from the wet paint, there were some bubbles in the water surface, and the underside of the trays (the lake is on two trays) began leaking $20 worth of fake water all over the kitchen table and wood floor. There was nothing I could do about the cloudy water, the bubbles I started popping with a pin but discovered that my finger tip worked better, and the leaks were "stopped" by my duct taping wads of paper towels under the tray. The leaks didn't really stop but there was less leaking onto the table.

I tried to carry the trays into the garage where I didn't care about leaking water, but the trays didn't fit through the door (groan). I figured that the water was only 1/8" deep (3.1mm) and was already a little thick from drying... maybe I could turn the trays sideways for 2 seconds and get them through the door. I got a bit of water on the grass and some on the laundry room floor, but I got the water to dry in the garage.

The water looked terrible when it finally dried (the bottle said 24 hours, but in a garage with no ventilation, 36 hours is probably more reasonable). The water was uneven and had fingerprints in it from my seeing how dry it was. The blue was also WAY too blue. It was just too bright for my model. so, about a week after I first poured the water, I repainted the water (with helpful supervision and a little micromanaging from my loving partner, Betsy). It was so hot out, that the newly colored paint (more black and grey than before, but still very much blue) was drying before I could blend the colors well. The result was a lot more streaky than before which actually looked more like the satellite images on Google Earth/Google Maps. Also, because it was so hot out, the paint was dry in a matter of hours. I poured the water for the second time and my girlfriend and I spread it to the edges. The bottle said to spread the water to the edges of the lake with a tooth pick, but my lake was so big, that Betsy and I just blew it to the edges of the lake. By the way, I do not recommend blowing on fake water unless you enjoy dizziness. Yeah, we got a little high on water, I'm not ashamed.

I'm now realizing that maybe I should have posted a blog sooner; this is going to be very long.

In the panel with my campus, I painted all of the roads grey. I was originally thinking to paint them black, but roads aren't really black, are they. My only regret is that I used glossy paint why turned out to be very... um... glossy. I discovered that if you put enough paint down, the paint automatically smooths itself, but if you put too much it runs onto the grass. Once that dried, I added sidewalks by scraping away the grass the same way that I scraped away the grass for the roads. The color of the vinyl is a good enough color for he sidewalks in my opinion, so that was easy. also on the panel, I painted on the yellow and white road markings using the tiniest of paints (which Hobby Works in Maryland has a very large selection of), and an even tinier paint brush. It came out really nice in most spots, but I had a bit of difficulty keeping all of the parking lot lines the same thickness and length, but I touched it up with grey paint and it looks less sloppy now.

Lastly, I am experimenting with how to make houses. Keeping in mind that even a two story house is 3/8" (9.5 mm), even a monopoly house and/or hotel is slightly too big. On the other hand, there are going to be over 1000 houses (I should really count out that number exactly, so I called the people at Hasbro and at USAopoly. They both said no, but maybe I could take the combined 100 houses and hotels that I already have in my two monopoly sets and copy the, 10 times in a resin copier I found in the hobby shop. The resin copier is like $70, though!

Another option for the houses is to make them all individually. I could take a sheet of 1/8" thick wood and cut our a floor plan. I'll paint the sides of house white and then color it as I want (sharpie doors and windows). I tried this already with the three identical dorms that form the mini-quad on my schools campus. I had originally planned on painting the buildings white and then coloring them with marker. It doesn't look like marker really sticks to paint, but maybe the paint was still too wet. Anyway, it still looks really cute, but I may still touch it up. I suppose that what you see in the photographs are actually the mini "miniquad."

Okay, I think that I am all caught up. Until next time!