Ready for more! Another prominent feature of the Coast Line RR will be the Teal's Light to the north. I've made this drawing, which I believe pretty much is how it'll turn out. It's a free mix of the lovely lighthouses on the Maine coast. There's a lifeboat house with loft, oil house with bell and foghorn on scaffold, and living quarters. A radio mast for communications.
Masonry tower, shingle roofs and clapboard sidings. Few and smallish windows with storm shutters. Weathered white all over.

So I'm once again in the exiting process of gathering scratchbuilding materials...

Following by some days wasted with tedious stuff like work, visitors and house refurbishing, finally there's room for progress on the lighthouse
I started with the conical lighthouse itself, as in the drawing:

After a bit of fiddling with rulers, compass and PI, I made a cardboard former:

I rolled it over the table edge and taped it together with masking tape, then inserted some rings from different sized cardboard tubes

While the spackle dried, I fashioned a ring of styrene, covered with some nonslip pattern styrene:

I sawed off a part of a lightbulb fixture for the light, made an octohedral window from clear styrene and a "lid" with the inside light thingame, made from an exacto knife protector of a sort (not very scientific, but it works)

I made an octohedral roof from styrene, spackled a bit to even out the rough edges,a ring railing from model ship stanchions and brass wire, and have begun building a stair house in two parts, under and over the platform:

Now on to windows, door and paint, before I tacle the adjoining houses and the radio antenna.

The tower has a base diameter of 16 ccale feet, and a 53 feet height.

Not a big height, but it will seem bigger on top of the cliff, and the boat house has a lower base height, so that too should make it look taller.

The complex of houses will have an approximate length of 90-100 feet

The lighthouse has been painted. Just the usual acrylic stuff, no washes or powders.

Half the back of the tower will be inside the boat house, so I went fast there. I looked at a lot of Maine lighthouses, and most are white and black, so I kept with that.

I'm focused when I work, but most of all, I cheat whenever possible. I use little bracing, because I'll be the only one handling the stuff, and styrene is quite stable anyway. I eyeball a LOT, and cut corners whenever possible. I don't bother to detail the backside of houses, paint with dirty brushes dipped in several colors at the same time to get color and weathering at the same time etc.

Anyway, the boathouse has come a little further: I put together some walls from evergreen styrene clapboard (nailholed with a pounce wheel), Two Grandt Line windows and door, plus the storm shutters. I left room for the light-tower in the front wall.
 

After test fitting, I put in a stiffening first floor, and painted the inside black. I glued together some 4cm purple?! foam as a base

After marking the building outline, I went crazy with a knife and a two sided japanese saw for a while. I roughed out the stone foundation (also for the oil house in the back), and will etch that with CA tomorrow

Posing the stuff on the base, and shooting from a low angle, it is beginning to look a little like the original design drawing

After a few drybrush passes on the rockwork and especially on the stone foundation, with different earth blends from browns, greys and bluishblack, I glued the boathouse (which I had painted since last posting) and lighthouse to the foundation

To show the potential of foam carving (and because I need one!), I've also made the chimney for the living quarters to be. First a block of foam

Carved with a no 11 and heat gunned, and put on a tube of styrene

Shingles... A repetitious, but cozy occupation.
I start my shingles by painting streaks of blended colors (white, payne's grey, black, browns, ochre and green) with a worn brush on my favorite medium brown Canson MiTeintes pastel paper

Then the long and tedious work begins, with a pair of fine scissors (mine a flytying scissors)I cut individually wide shingles three quarters through, then cut the ends in a varied way to give life to the strips

The cardboard subroofs are marked, first with a 7mm line lowest, then with the shingle reveal distance.

I use 3 or 4 mm, and here it is 4mm

I then cover the roof with doublefaced semitranslucent carpet tape, and lay down strip after strip along the marked lines

The top rows of shingles and the capping go on tomorrow, when the roof is assembled on the house.

The shingles look a bit too contrasty now, but when blended together by lightly drybrushing with a darkish brown-grey, then highlighted with warm white on the edges, they will look fine.

Well, I've now "finished" the Teal's lighthouse complex, or come as far as I want before installing it in the layout. I've built the two smaller buildings: the living quarters, and the oil house. The first has a rolled asphalt roof, a big chimney, and is made the same way as the boathouse. The oil house is a stuccoed brick building, made from spackled cardboard, and with a shingled roof. I built the fog bell/horn tower and some additional walkways too. The replacement LP for the on duty LP has just arrived from the Teal's Cove station.

A little detailing has been added, but much more litter and scenery will come later.

Sorry for the dreary grey drywall background... I'm living in a refurbishing mess....
This was a long haul, but fun. And now the big trouble starts all over again: what do I build next?

Troels Kirk
Näsum, Sweden

http://coastline.no13.se

I've tried to estimate.... from the exif codes on the photos, I can see that I began the tower on jan 5th, so 25 days, of which I perhaps spent 20 modeling, and 1-1.5 hours per night average (although yesterday I spent 4-5), so somewhere around 30-35 hours should be right. But I never waste time while working, i.e. no phone, no chat, when paint dries I work on something else, I have the acrylic "palette" in a flat tupperware container, so the colors never dry out etc