Dominion Tack and Nail

Left: Tacks from Dominion Tack & Nail; Right: Scan from the Clyde Fans box.

I was going through some of my father's old tools and came across that little box of carpet tacks from the Dominion Tack and Nail Company of Galt, Ontario. The box's font looked much like that used by Seth in his drawings of the fictional town of Dominion, Ontario. Not to mention the Dominion connection. Art imitating life.

Video store set

The interior shots of the video store were done on a 'set', not inside the actual model. I did it this way so that it was possible to take unencumbered eye-level photos of scenes inside the store. I wasn't too sure how this would work, so I built a set of the easiest and most important section of the store, the main video wall that contains new movie releases as well as new American and British tv shows and a section dedicated to movies from the Criterion collection. The wall was photographed in sections: one photo for each rack and a few others for the posters at the top. These photos were then rescaled and pieced together - no doubt there is an app out there to do the hard work, but it turned out to be not too difficult. Set scene photos were shot with an LED light block held over the set to provide fairly uniform illumination. Is it cheating to use photos for the racks and models for the figures? Probably, but I find the contrast between the two elements interesting, and it's getting closer to producing the kind of feeling I'm looking for.

Wall 'o Videos

That's the new release wall of movies and tv series along with mucho discs from the Criterion collection. The wall is a photo composite of images taken inside Movies 'n Stuff here in Ottawa, and scaled to approximately HO - it's a little larger so the discs are a little more distinct. It's a great place.

Waiting for the night bus

I've been fiddling now-and-then with adding finishing touches to the natural history museum as sort of an exercise to easing back into model building stuff. I've posted some photos over at Instagram. When I set up an account there a month or so ago my goal was to post all my staged photos to see what sort of patterns appeared. I thought that the tiling arrangement they enforce on photos might be useful for seeing patterns. I'm still thinking about those patterns, and haven't yet come to any conclusions.

Improving the Badger paint stirrer

Long time board member, Director of Advanced Technical Research, and Zen Airbrush Master here at the 30 Squares Media Empire World Domination Headquarters, Vince, has an awesome article called Improving the Badger paint stirrer in the August issue of Railroad Model Hobbyist. Check it out!