A New Bridge

It has been a while since I have posted, but there has been some slow progress made. Previously, I had shown the pedestrian bridge for the town. I finally had cause to order some parts from Shapeways, and I ordered the bridge too.

On the left is the FUD version, on the right is the professional plastic version. This is a material produced by HP for 3D printing. It is fairly robust, but not quite as fine as the FUD material. The grains you see are not the photograph, but the material. So, for T, not quite good enough for me, but for other scales....

Anyways, the bridge needed a bit of painting to give it a nice brick color, and then some concrete washes to bring out the individual bricks, and the concrete portions of the bridge. I tried several approaches, and actually found that burnishing the paint on with the tip of a toothpick seemed to work best.

One more feature of the bridge is the installation of a mirror under the bridge. In this case, I found a mirrored plastic panel on Amazon.com. This can be easily cut with normal scissors. For a backdrop mirror, I think it works well enough.

You can see the bottom seam of the mirror, but in this case, I have simply set the bridge of a paper printout of the road. I think when I install the real thing, and have the road butting into the mirror, as well as the sidewalks on the sides to add a little 3D definition, and as a result, I expect that the seem will be much more difficult to see.

Against the backdrop, this will be a nice little trick to add depth into the backdrop. Just compare this picture, to the top view of the bridge.

I think it works very well.