Befawley - A Diorama to Practice New Skills!

It's been a while, hasn't it!
5 months to be precise - I can't believe where the time goes. The truth is, that although I only planned to have a month break, my life has been somewhat interrupted by things out of my control. Thus, it has been very hard to get back into model-making!

I decided to pop back onto both RMweb and NGRM-online today to see what I had missed in the last few months, and as I expected I had missed out on a lot of advancements on projects I had been following with interest. Thus this sparked the creative part of my brain and I realised it had been too long since I had done any model-making and that I should really get on with it!

That left me with a slight problem. Old AGWI Rd. had to be taken down to make space for new occupants of the house, and I have very little space now with which to work on the project - and anything I did work on would have to be packed away at the end of every session. Another problem I face is that I am now at the stage on the layout where I can start to add texture and colours, but this is something I have very little experience of. With my old layout (Calshot), all I did was spray one basic colour on the layout to represent concrete. With this layout, I have grass, mud, water, salt marsh, brick, concrete, cobble, trees, vegetation... the list goes on - and very few of these I have had much luck with in the past.

For this layout, I want it to have a more realistic outcome in terms of scenery by using techniques I have never used before - such as static grass, and properly painting stonework etc. But I have no idea about any of this, and I didn't want to risk experimenting on what I hope will be my last layout for a good number of years!

The solution? A test bed/diorama/micro-layout, of course!

I'm someone that is very reluctant to try out new techniques through fear of messing up spectacularly. So I figured that building a little test diorama (which I can also use for stock photography later on) would be a good compromise without wasting many resources, and causing potential damage to the main layout.

This is what I have so far (click to enlarge):

I've basically tried to add as many elements as possible from Old AGWI Rd. that I either want to better my skills in, or that I've never had to model before. So there's a bit of everything on this test bed; from producing relatively lifelike water, mud, saltmarsh and vegetation, to stone walls, concrete, wooden posts and corrugate iron structures to learn painting techniques.

As for size, I'm not really sure at this point, but I definitely don't want it to be any bigger than it needs to be to get every element in. I'm hoping for a rough size of 1ft x 3ft, but we'll see how that turns out - it might even get smaller!

Comments, questions and suggestions are very welcome!

Oh, as for the name "Befawley"? Well it's "before Fawley" since Old AGWI Rd. is based on Fawley Oil Refinery!