More Rubbish

"It's going to take ages to move this lot."

This week I'm showing how I've  made some of the detritus I've used on my models.
I've used these sacks on a couple of models (garage and bins); they can add a bit of detail and interest for very little effort, which I'm all in favour of.

A can be seen in the photograph to the left they all start out as strips of newspaper, torn to apporximate size.
I've then added what I think is a cigarette filter (I've had a box of these for years and never figured out what they were).
The advantage in using something like the filter is that they are all of a uniform size and hence the sacks will be very close in size too.
After a touch of glue to the length of the strip it is then rolled into a tube and left to dry. I use UHU  (£1 for a big tube from Poundland) for this which dries very quickly, but I would think any paper type glue would do.
Once dry (or fairly dry) I then put a drop of glue in each end of the cylinder and nip the ends together to get something that looks a bit like a wrapped sweet.
Once these have dried out I trim the ends to get what is in effect the final product.
The various stages can be seen in the photograph, I've included the set-square to show the relative sizes of the start to finish.

The ends can be left as they are if you're going to use the sacks horizontally or one end can be pushed flat if they're to be used  vertically. (Both can be seen in the photograph at the top)
The half a dozen or so prototypes I made also had a small blue label glued onto them (cut from a newspaper classifieds), but I thought this to be too much of a faff when making lots of them.

The sacks were given a quick paint-job of yellow ochre highlighted in white to get to the stage where I was happy enough to declare them "done"

When I was making my rubbish bins, I wanted  to represent the black plastic bin-bags which are so prevalent in the UK and I presume from TV evidence the USA too.
I had thought of using the same method as I used for the sacks but this would have lead to a too uniform sack.
For the first attempt I used a strip of newspaper with a rolled ball of newspaper glued to it. The strip was then folded  and glued. Next I had to paint the whole thing a gloss black which was very messy and time consuming and so was abandoned for those reasons.

The next method was to use actual plastic bin bags as the base material. I cut a strip about 30mm around the top of the bag then cut that strip into more manageable lengths of about 150mm, as can be seen in the photograph above.
I then glued small balls of newspaper to the strips (as can be seen). The whole 150mm strip was then glued and folded over, giving the impression of peas in a pod (sorry no photo- my bad). Before the glue was completely set the individual bags were cut from the strip and the top given a twist. Like the sacks some of the bags had to be given a final trim to finish them off.
What I thought to be an interesting spin off from this was that not all the bags glued well and there was some of their newspaper content showing.
I was quite pleased with this and left them in that state after trimming.
I think the total time to make all the bin-bags you can see in the above photograph took about an hour, as did the sacks, (in addition, painting the sacks took some time too). I didn't think the bin-bags needed any painting though they may well get some when they're added to a model.

For more rubbish I decided that having newspapers would be relatively quick to do and could be quite effective. I used two or three of these newspapers in my rubbish bins.
This was a very time consuming task and not one that I would want to repeat in a hurry.
I used my Google-Fu to come up with numerous newspaper front pages and some pages that could be used as their backs or content.
They then had to resized and transferred to one sheet, which, although not difficult, was mind-numbingly boring.

The headlines can actually be made out, though you wouldn't think it from this photograph.

The block of front pages that can be made out, can be glued to the block of back pages directly below it if carefully cut out. These in turn can be cut out individually, as required.
The sizes of the various newspapers vary slightly but are generally about 1cm by 2cm, which to scale is probably far too large but they look ok to me.

The other "newspapers"  shown are generally just a front and a back which can be cut out as one, glued and folded.

No ,matter what searches I put in I couldn't come up with more than one Zombie style headline, the force just wasn't with me the night I did this.
I could of course, make my own headline up and attach them to fake newspapers of my own but the time that would involve just doesn't seem worth it for the result.



Well, that's it for this week, my work here is done, except to welcome my two latest followers, Bacon Fat and Oli. and as always comments are both welcomed and appreciated