Foundation time.

It is another day of back ache! It was another reasonable day so having drained myself yesterday moving the drain to enable me to put the foundation in for a step into the rebuilt conservatory I did actually put that foundation in. My back is again aching! Mrs. Woody tells me I am over doing things! I think it is more that I am getting older and my back just isn't as hardy as it used to be! Anyway the foundation is a two step one which means one side will have three courses of bricks to bring it up to the level where the step needs to be whilst the other side will have two courses. The ends will be a mix! It makes sense in my mind but how that equates to a workable solution is as usual open to debate! The foundation had to be dug out and concrete hand mixed which is probably why my back is somewhat aching.

I was hoping that the base left from the lifted slabs would be a suitable foundation but unfortunately it was very thick in the first place I tested but very flimsy in all the other areas so it had to come up!

The rear of the foundation in and three couses of bricks will go on that.

The front and ends are at a higher level.

A smaller cat audience today and Matty was probably wondering why I was out in the rain which came during the last hour of work.

I did manage a half hour or so continuing to paint my model people from the Dapol Platform Figures. It is one of those jobs which if you just have a half hour or hour every so often is quite therapeutic and more importantly back friendly! They are almost at the point where I will varnish them and then cut them from the sprue to paint hair/hats and shoes. Leaving them on the sprue makes it easier to paint and avoiding handling them means the risk of rubbing the paint off with fingers is minimised. Once the varnish is on they will be more robust to being handled. 

You may notice the plastic pot lid that is my paint pallet - very handy and once it is too messy it can be washed clean and looking like new. Wish I could look like new when I wash!

Figure it out!

A quiet day today and one where I figured out that my 009 narrow gauge layout will eventually need some figures to give it life. I could buy ready painted ones by a variety of manufacturers at a cost of somewhere in the region of £1 to £3 a figure. I know you can get bundles of 50 to 100 ready painted figures on eBay but the ones I have seen do look as though they have been painted with a tar brush using colours from a clowns make up box. I figured that I would be better off painting some figures myself especially as I had a pack of Dapol's Platform Figures in stock. In fact I had used three of them to populate my Leyland National bus that I built last year.

I think I paid about £4 for them not so long ago but I see they are now about £7.50. That is still cheaper than buying ready painted figures even allowing a few pounds for he paint used. First stage in painting them was to give them an undercoat of black primer. However whilst I had the airbrush out and before loading it with white paint I had the unusual inspirational idea that I could spray the cattle grid gate and track bridge from my 009 layout white to move that project on. This would mean I would only need to clean the airbrush out once at the end of the session of spraying as loading it with black paint after the white would produce a still suitable dark grey undercoat.

With the primer dry the job of painting the figures commences. They are actually nicely detailed figures which I think do not date back the 60 years to the Airfix figures but are more recent. As usually the power and resolution of digital photography makes my painting abilities look bad but in reality from normal viewing distance the nearly finished ones look OK - honest!

I figured out that it would be easier to leave the figures on their sprue at the moment to ease the painting. Their hats and shoes will be painted in once the rest of the body is painted and the figure removed from the sprue.