Impressions of Disneyland

[southwestforests]

Ahh, the Nautilus, cool stuff.
And the monorail - look up recent book Monorails by Kim A. Pederson of the Monorail Society.
And some Nautilus trivia, The Catalog of Nautilus Designs A Catalog of Nautilus Designs

[beckychestney]

Originally Posted by elliott

Always been fascinated by the Swiss Family Robinson Tree in the movie; it's just as fascinating here. Never would have guessed what it is made of.
How clever of you to use the Pirates of the Caribbean entrance to hide the base of your Christmas tree!
The Liberty tree park scene is lovely. Was it hard to make the lanterns for the grain-of-wheat bulbs?
Looking forward to more......

Oh no. They're taken exactly as-is from the DE Wicked Wench kit except that I printed them on 20lb paper rather than the 65lb card I usually use. Then I just used a small dab of hot glue to keep them on the bulbs.

[beckychestney]

Sleeping Beauty Castle

Let's get to the heart of the park. I don't really have any build photos of the castle itself, just pics from doing the landscaping. The only real changes I made to the kit were to add black paper and/or black cardstock to interior spaces to block light penetration. These pics will at least give you some ideas how and where I lighted it:



The floodlights in front were made using plastic caps from I don't even remember what and the bases were little plastic Y shaped pieces that used to come on bottles of Flonaise!



The upper level flood lights are hidden in little light boxes I embedded in the rear of the towers that flank the entrance. It's subtle, but you can see the 2 windo sections here also light up and, there's also a slight gap at the base of the main tower to create "up-lighting".



Around back you can see the lights inside the castle that are otherwise invisible when the park is set-up. There's only about 4 inches between this area and the lagoon at the base of the Matterhorn. It's also facing walls!



This one is my favorite. The lighting just all worked out great for this photo and I only wish I had the slightest clue how it happened!



Looking toward the drawbridge you can see how well the polyeurethane "water" reflects the model.



Believe it or not, the castle is already scheduled for demo and reconstruction. It's taken some damage since these photos were taken in 2011 and it's already fading a bit. I had hoped to get to it this summer but I doubt I'll have enough time with all the new stuff I'm trying to add. But at the very least I want to replace the trees with a new type I started making last year.

First, a word of caution. This technique uses 380 degree Fahrenheit glue and is not for everybody.

I use 26 gauge uncoated floral wire to make the skeleton:



Sometimes I use a jig but most of the time I just coil out the wire in a continuous loop. Eight loops per branch has been a good number for me. Make each 8 loop cluster different lengths and have them come from different levels of the main trunk:



Twist, twist, twist!





Start applying the glue. You have to work slow and give the glue enough time to cool. So don't work one branch at a time. Work the bottoms of all branches on the highest level, and then go back to the first one and start working the tops. Work the tree from the top down and fold the lower branches down out of your way. Don't fold them back up until you've coated the trunk between levels.



I like to use plastic caps of various sizes as a temporary base for these trees. I drill a small hole in the center and let about 5mm of the steel poke through so I can mount them later. Also, use the glue to create a root structure for your tree.

Painting:



Glom on your base coat. And I mean glom! Let it go on thick and let it dry completely before you move on. I like to use a light brown, either a beige or sable.



The next step is alight gray wash. I do a 1:1 acrylic/water wash and let it flow from the top down. Notice that you can still see some of the wire here. Since this tree will receive flocking the exposed metal won't show.



After the gray dries, it's time for the shadow wash. This is a 1:4 black/water wash. I let it flow into all the nooks and crannies and really bring out all the character of the "bark".



The last step is the foliage. I like Woodland Scenics clump foliage which usually comes in bricks. I pull off 2 clumps at a time and stretch them out a bit. One large and high for the top and one thinner for the bottom. Then I put a bit of hot glue on the tips of the branch I want to foliate and make a sandwich of it between the two clumps of foam rubber. It's best to start with the lower branches and work around and up. That's it. When you're ready to plant, you pry up the tree roots and all from your temporary base and you're good to go. I use hot glue to install the trees too.

This works well for just about any type of tree. I've done simple greens like the one I made here, flowering trees, even a reasonable rendition of a weeping willow. Just experiment and have fun. But watch your glue gun! You can get burned very fast!

[southwestforests]

Lights add a lot of atmosphere to castle.
Tree technique might be worth trying at our model RR club.

[beckychestney]

Splash Mountain

This is where that tree ended up:



The denuded tree on the upper level and the stump up top were made using the same method. As were:



The bark on the ride vehicles. Mountain construction should be no surprise as it was very similar to my previously described technique. The only difference, and I hope it doesn't turn out to be a mistake in the long run, was that I used minimally expanding latex foam for this module rather than the max expanding polyeurethane foam I'm accustomed to. It took forever to set at all and it's way too easy to damage. I'm just going to have to hope it holds up.



I know this photo is a bit dark...but can you find Splash Mountain in it?



How about now? It lives in the left rear corner of the display which is near our front door. Because of that, there's an end table directly above the mountain to protect it and the rest of the layout. The white picket fence is also a great way to protect the layout as it acts as a "first defense" against those wayward toes!

Since trees seems to be my theme for today, here's one of those "little things" that I love to make:



My rendition of WDW's neon palms.



There are 4 of these adding light to Tomorrowland. I made them using N Gauge 6v DC highway lights. This is a bit of a pain actually because my standard lighting grid for the layout is 14v AC. So I have a small power pack hidden inside Space Mountain just for these lights.

The same type of lamps are used in Fantasyland at the Mad Tea Party:



You can see that they originally had a light lower down that I removed from the palms since they would have ended up inside the trunks. The Tea Party features cups made from ping pong balls. The bases are little inserts from the caps of childproof pill bottles and the handles are just bits of wire. None of that stuff was easy to paint by the way! The people are early hot glue people or as I like to call them "glueples".

In the background of this photo is one of those projects that came and went. Which I think is what I'll blog about tomorrow.

Becky

[southwestforests]

Am curious about the riverboat.
Neon palms, that's an idea I'd have never guessed.

[gotham]

Loving your work, the effort put in pays off with the visual results.

[beckychestney]

Originally Posted by southwestforests

Am curious about the riverboat.
Neon palms, that's an idea I'd have never guessed.

I'll get to the Mark Twain soon! I love it too!

[beckychestney]

Yesterland, as one of my favorite websites is named. These are a few of the things that came and went for one reason or another.

Basically when I started this project I built everything oversized to fill as much space as possible. Why? Because that way I could carve out more real estate early and downsize attractions in the following years as I came up with better designs. Making the park big and impressive on day one quelled the arguments about how much of the living room it takes up! Sneaky little devil aint I?

The Wicked Wench.



This one was really great. But also really really big and way too tall.



It represented the Jolly Rodger which was a restaurant run by Chicken of the Sea that lived in Fantasyland from 1955 to 1982.



It was also captain Hook's ship. So naturally I had a croc!



The string of lights around the lagoon really created atmosphere!



Over time it first lost it's beach and tent, then it lost it's height. In 2015 it lost it's place to make way for the new Storybookland. The model still exists, I don't think I'll ever destroy it unless I feel like building a new one. But this size model was always scraping it's masts on the lowest branches of the tree. So when the Disney Experience announced that there would soon be a model of the actual restaurant, I had no problem setting this one out in favor of the new model. Still holding the space open...

This is why the WW lost it's beachfront:



I decided to have a parade!







The parade ran from Dumbo to Frontierland in an endless loop using a Tomy James engine as motive power for the 2013 season only. While it performed reliably in testing, I just couldn't keep the floats from colliding with things near the track in practice. So it was easy to decide to have more structures rather than keep the rather large amount of space required to keep the parade, so it was retired.

The third major attraction I attempted from scratch was this:



Using a 3d template as a guide, I cut the front and rear end sections from aluminum soda cans.



I had difficulty with the noses so I ended up making those with Sculpey oven bake clay. The car bodies were from Marx M10,000 clockwork trains of the 1930's. It ran on a Lionel motor on a system of O31 3 rail track elevated on pylons of my own design.



So it was more "elevated train" than monorail!



But painted up it didn't look too shaby!



Like the parade it ran in 2013 only. It's principal downfall was the track. The addition of brass side skirts to the cars coupled with the cars only having a single axle was just too much for the little train. Constant derails coupled with the high initial cost of replacing the track with a wider radius curvature sealed it's fate. At an average of 30 dollars per car, of which there were 5, plus the cost of the motor which was around $50 I just couldn't add another $100 to 150$ for new track for a train that still only "might" work better. It was cheaper to buy the battery operated set from the Disney Store which is what I did in 2015.

Another yester item was the first Frontierland Station.



This was the Build Your Own Lincoln Sites station from the Historic Illinois website. Not my first choice but for season 1 I needed a station of some sort, so I chose this one. Notice the Matterhorn under construction behind it!

Last but certainly not least was the Liberty Square Haunted Mansion.



It started it's career with the attached cemetery.





Again it was just too large to stay. Also, it was always in the center rear of the layout in a place that's very hard to see. So it too gave way and now a new Haunted Mansion will rise in New Orleans Square.

[beckychestney]

Tom Sawyer Island



Starting with the Disney Experience Mark Twain and the Seite 42 Micky Maus Magazin Old West Fort kits as my guide, TSI and the Rivers of America were carved out using my favorite mountain building techniques. With the exception that I had some hydrocal plaster rock castings sitting around not doing anything which I decided to include.





This bridge spans the river at the rear so the train won't have to go swimming!



Originally it was the "under the table" item where Splash Mountain lives today. Note the "new" Frontierland Station that replaced the one shown in my previous post. It too has been replaced by a rebuild due to damage incurred in a train wreck!

And the Mark Twain too has been rebuilt;



If you scroll up to the first photo you can clearly see the railings warping outward on the previous model. For this 2014 rebuild I added reinforcing columns and thickened the decks to prevent the sagging. I also printed several copies of each railing page so I could have both an inner and outer texture which the original kit lacks. If you want to do that, you have to reverse the parts and since I couldn't print a mirror image I just swapped the pieces port and starboard to create the inside. I also glued the railing sections to posterboard before cutting so they're a lot thinker than they're meant to be. That means you'll need to trim the decks accordingly. The ship also got lighting this time around!



Along with the new Twain I built this little dock structure. Originally the river came right up to the edge of the board across the front and somehow as if by magic the water never flooded Frontierland! This is just matchstick construction with a cardstock roof but the lattice in the railings is plastic canvas. This is sold in knitting stores or departments of craft stores and is meant for yarn work. But I think it makes dandy lattice!



And Fort Wilderness too got upgraded. The new fort is made mostly of wood and bamboo. Gone too are the "blue" spruces.

Bear/Critter Country



Small land!



CBJ joined the fun in 2012. It lived first along side the Jungle Cruise.



Then it lived between Big Thunder Mountain and the Haunted Mansion with the displaced Liberty Tree (don't remember why the tree got booted from Liberty Square). And now it backs up to Tom Sawyer Island in front of Splash Mountain. These bears really get around!