A couple of weeks ago, I was sent a pack of building papers from a new company: Truetexture.
Brick and stone papers have been around since the dawn of railway modelling time but these are a bit different being based on photographs. The colours certainly look very nice and there aren't many of them exhibiting the repeats you get when tiling photos to fill a sheet.Print quality is very high although they do have a slight sheen which would benefit from a shot of matt varnish.
One surprise was that they are flat - the "texture" part of the name is the graphic design term meaning a patterned fill rather than the modelling version where the bricks or stones would be proud of the surfaces such as in embossed plasticard. From reasonable viewing distances this will look fine and the accurate colour will compensate and fool the eye.
As well as the building sheets, the range includes waterslide transfers for window tops and road markings. There are acetate windows which are designed to look 3D.
I'll have a go with the sheets in the future and say how I got on. For the moment, you can read more about the range on the Truetexture website.
I have found photo images to be very satisfying portrayals and they are quite easy to create and print yourself using graphic editing software. I know some of you will not have such tools but there is a website out there that has an online tool to create brick sheets from stock styles, colours and bonds to scale for you to print directly and without charge.
ReplyDeleteNot completely without cost, you need decent paper and ink. The big problem with home printers is the fade resistance of the ink. I know one layout done this way that has purple buildings thanks to this.
ReplyDeleteThat said, doing this is satisfying if you have the skills. I do a lot of signs and details this way rather than buying in.
Interesting point about fading. I use a spray fixer to stop the ink running if it got wet but I don't know if it preserves the colour. I hope http://wynyardlanemodels.blogspot.com/ reads your comment too. He is a mega user.
ReplyDeleteI found printing my own self adhesive labels to be quite expensive. The labels themselves can cost 20p for an A4 sheet unless you by massive quantities and for any inkjet printer it will cost about 5-7p per page for 5% coverage. These pages are about 90% coverage. Then you have got waste pages. And inkjet printed pages will run if they get wet. I had all sorts of problems. I was printing my own for quite a while before I worked out it was costing me over £1 a page! that is partly what prompted me to produce this range.
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