Using Printed Paper Modelling for Structures

There are scads of internet sites to get both free and nominal sum pix of all kinds of buildings. Just Google the title of this post.
This shot shows me printing off a series of city buildings large and small that can serve to fill an exis-ting background space in our Wel-lington Yard. They will be a tem-porary fill in while we await more permanent buildings from  a soon to be dismantled layout.
I'm using a Pinterest site for these prints that come in HO scale com-plete with fold lines and ready to cut out.

Here are three separate printed images fastened to frames as shown in the next picture. I used Elmer's spray adhesive to fasten the paper to the frames and Weldbond white ad-hesive to tuck in any stray edges. With spray adhesive, be sure to lay the print accurately on the frame as you won't get a second change to align things up. I would suggest that you print on heavy bond paper to avoid any "glue stain" on the image side coming through the paper.





These are the frames behind the image buildings in the previous shot.
I used stuff from my scrap bin such as foamboard, some laminate floor scraps and hardboard to make quick frames cheaply. They do need to be accurately sized and square to fit the image fold lines as accurately as possible. You can see some of the fold tabs on the back edges but most I trimmed off with my trusty Exacto knife with its #11 blade. Am I begin-ning to sound like Cody Grivno in Model Railroader magazine??



I did something different when assembling this building as I want it to stand out from the background. The frontpiece of this building came without the narrow sidepieces equivalent to one verical window section which were printed separately. So, to get the desired width of the left building side, I simply printed off more window sections, in this case, 2 more [each print covers 2 sections] and glued their tabs together before I used spray adhesive to join image and foam-board.  I used scrap materials for the underlying structure and added a top angled roof piece mainly as a brace.


Here are the buildings in their Wel-
lington Yard location with sidwalks, pedestrians, vehicles and scenery in place.
The photo just visible to the right is of the future buildings for this site at which point these buildings will re-
turn to other paper counterparts on my layout.
Several of the club members com-mented on the 3D look of the images and they can make a nice stand-in scene for the right price. It's a fun way to add to your background that I've used for years.