Orig­i­nal­ly I had intend­ed to con­struct the build­ings for White­sands Quay using Pen­don meth­ods but I real­ly don’t have the hun­dreds of hours required to find, mea­sure, pho­to­graph, draw, emboss, water­colour and con­struct suit­able build­ings for this lay­out. That way mad­ness can occur. How­ev­er I was set on that route until Scalescenes intro­duced a new kit — Row of cot­tages which I was imme­di­ate­ly inspired by.
The kit is par­tic­u­lar­ly cheap as it is a PDF down­load. You have to print the PDF sheets out and stick them to suit­able weights of card as detailed in the kit instruc­tions. Some of the thick­er card com­po­nents can be hard work to cut out and a good Stan­ley knife is a must have, else I used my usu­al scalpels for cut­ting. This kit comes with sev­er­al vari­a­tions and although I had opt­ed for the flint and brick fin­ish it came with an option­al ren­dered ver­sion for two of the four cot­tages which I have extend­ed for all four as it would be appro­pri­ate for cot­tages next to a quay. One of the advan­tages of these kits is that you only pay once for the PDF and then you can print out as many times as you want — so any mis­takes and you can start again. Of course cost of a new real­ly good pho­to print­er needs to be con­sid­ered as well as con­sum­ables (but we need­ed a new print­er anyway…).
The key con­struc­tion method is wrap­ping the paper lay­ers around card walls — includ­ing an ingen­u­ous method of cre­at­ing drain­pipes that also con­ceal the gap between the end and side walls. Detailed floors and full inte­ri­ors are includ­ed — not that I think any­one will ever see them on White­sands Quay but I know they are there.
The only think I now have left to do on the cot­tages is source and put some prop­er chim­ney pots on.
I am very pleased with the over­all look and fin­ish of the kit. This then left me with a small dilem­ma. To get the rest of the mod­el to be bal­anced I real­ly need to con­struct the remain­ing build­ings using oth­er Scalescenes kits but there are none avail­able that suit the loca­tion. How­ev­er the meth­ods can be repli­cat­ed and that exact­ly what I have done for the large cot­tage in front of the row of cot­tages. I used a pic­ture of a cot­tage at Sen­nan on the West Cor­nish coast at White Sands bay, where White­sands Quay is fic­ti­tious­ly locat­ed, as the basis for the plans which I drew up in Adobe Illus­tra­tor then added suit­able tex­tures and print­ed the results out on mat­te pho­to paper. To get the thick stone cot­tage wall effect with deep set win­dows and doors I used poly­board for the walls instead of card and you can see the result­ing effect in the pho­to gallery.