Li'l Overlook

This lookout station is built primarily from the leftover cab from the AMT/Ertl 1/24 scale Li'll Gaser kit that was used to build Li'l Aqua and some Buddha figures bought at a nearby Japanese gifts store (although, figures of this sort can be bought at just about any Chinese variety and gift store).


The Li'l Aqua project used the back end of the Li'l Gasser kit, and the front end got relegated to my spares box.


The base was made from 0.080 inch sheet styrene, and everything - base, structure and Buddhas - was painted with PolyScale concrete coloured acrylic paint. Some loose washes of gray, black and rust coloured painted were then applied to add some visual interest.


The skylight, circular basement viewing port, and balcony are castings from the Tichy Train Group. I bought an assortment box of HO building details from Tichy last year, and it has come in handy in supplying parts for a variety of projects. The inside and outside ladders are items from Plastistruct.


The couch is built-up from styrene scraps and is meant to be in a modern, mid-century, 1950s-esque style. The abstract art on the inside back wall was cut from a much larger watercolour painting that didnít quite work out as planned. That little square is probably the best part :-) Before mounting, it was framed with some styrene right-angle stock painted an aluminum colour.


Why this building? I don't know. I seemed to have gotten on a path of looking at my leftover kit parts box in terms of what sort of HO-scale building I could make from the stuff it contained. Rummaging and thinking caused some ideas to flash. This is one of them.


I didn't have the complete idea at the beginning of the project, only that the cab could be the basis of a building, and I thought the size of the Buddhas made them good for incorporating into some kind of HO-scale model. I tend to work a lot like that: ideas develop while I'm actually working with parts.


Although, I was attracted to the cab as a starting point because - as I mentioned in an earlier post - it allowed for the viewer to look inside and see what was going on. I think this was the only preconceived idea I brought to the project.