Gerald Road: Fancy a pint?

I was talking with a good friend James last week about how I felt guilty I'd not done much on Gerald Road for a few weeks. That reflection was good, because it gave me the chance to recognise the emotion and let it go - as it could have festered and created a negative feeling towards the project...

Instead by acknowledging the feeling I felt much more positive and the result was I dug out the photo of the pub that had inspired me early in the project, did some guesstimate measuring and drew up a 'scale' drawing (funnily enough it wasn't far off the 'Paddington' style approximation!) and quickly transferred this to 30thou styrene.  

The beauty of N structures is how quickly they go together. Yes, you have to be neat - but really, you have to be neat in all scales. 30thou is a good thickness too, it's easy to work with, in larger scales would be too flimsy but in N is more than sufficient. I was in two minds about this building as it came together though - I've modified the real building - the extension on the right in reality was a flat roof, with an extension behind with a pitched roof - instead I've combined the elements in an interesting roofline - once painted I hope it feels more natural and evolved rather than quirky. The roof tiles were another experiment - in Bristol a lot of the roofs, especially those I remember near my Nan's house, had terracotta tiles. The pub was no exception so flat slate style courses wouldn't work and corrugated 4mm styrene too deep... but if I combined the two it might work well - so I applied paper strips over the styrene and pushed it down firmly with PVA glue - the result is a subtly undulating surface with the 'courses' provided by the overlapped paper strips. Subtle but noticeable. 

 

With the bulk of the structure made I will look to do the warehouse across the road (next to the cars) next before progressing further with finishing - the result should be the two 'show case' structures that are more consistent in finish, colour and detail worked on in parallel, then if I did them in series! I suppose there are two lessons here - one, it's ok to verbalise your emotions to friends and second, to push yourself a little with every project. It maintains interest and keeps you moving forwards. Until next time, more soon...

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