Building the Old West, Part 2

One of my building projects for winter 2021-2022 is another set of "old west" buildings. I decided to make this set of buildings as one unit to emulate how they were built one against the other as sometimes seen in real life. I thought this might be simpler than building four separate buildings, but I'm not so sure it turned out that way.

I changed up siding styles and facade styles just for some variety. The siding is individual scale boards cut from cedar.

A wood sidewalk typical of old west was added.

This is a window fit check. The white windows and doors were laser cut pieces purchased as a kit. The black doors and windows came out of my 3D printer.

The first step in aging the buildings is to apply a coating of dark weather proofing. It looks even older if you deliberately do a very poor job of coating the wood. After getting the visual effect I wanted with colored weather proofing, I bathed the entire structure in at least two coats of clear weather proofing. By "bathe", do mean literally pour liquid acrylic over the structure so that it impregnates all of the cracks and crevices.

The final touch in aging is various shades of gray paint. Once again, doing a very poor job of painting makes it look much older. In fact, it is actually somewhat tricky trying to do it this badly.

I wanted to create an illusion of having an actual interior. I did this by finding suitable images on the web, printing these at the right size, and then using them as the backdrop on a concave shaped plastic shell inside the buildings. Only the mercantile had actual 3D objects set in front of this printed backdrop.

Almost done. Last step is to dry-brush the signage using custom cut stencils.

Here are the finished buildings on the layout.

All of the buildings are lighted inside.

The illusion of having a complete and detailed interior seems to work pretty well.