Route 541 Along the River
I decided to take the concept to the "next level" by adding illumination. The bottle assortment included tall ones, almost 3 inches, and laid on its side seemed like the ideal container for a road with streetlights. Given the new challenges, I kept the overall design simple—just road, track and trees—inspired by my old stomping grounds along the Delaware River north of Lambertville.
The primary hurdle was a power supply. I had some cheap strings of "fairy lights" left over from a birthday party, and sacrificed a string to get the battery box. For the streetlights, I purchased warm white prewired 0201 SMD LEDs, which are now available in sets of ten from Amazon for $15. That may sound like a lot, but warm white 0201s are like hens teeth, and prewired SMDs are an absolute necessity. Trust me, a buck and a half each for these babies is totally worth it. (Boy do I wish these were around a couple of decades ago; I'd have been mowing through them by the hundreds—no exaggeration.)
I started by making a scenery base from several layers of sheet styrene. I simulated rock faces using premixed sanded grout shaped with a knife while still wet. As for the streetlights, I simply bent the wire leads to shape, then applied a couple of thick coats of acrylic paint. That's it! Could not be simpler! Now, installing them was another matter, because handling them was tough going, especially given my loss of eye-hand dexterity; worse, once they were installed, handling the diorama itself became a nano-nightmare.
The vegetation hides a multitude of sins, mostly the gaps between the base and the roads. Some of the greenery isn't even glued in place; I simply stuffed it into the gaps. The vegetation on the rock faces was simply acrylic paint carefully dry-brushed on. The trees were especially fun on this one because many of them leaned out over the track and roads, which created a wonderful aesthetic; however, this was also done partly out of necessity because of the jar being on its side.
This one took longer to make than all three of the prior ones combined, although quite a bit of that extra time was spent trying to figure out how to do things, as opposed to doing them. I almost gave up on it a couple of times, but the thought of being a quitter was off-putting just enough to keep me going. It's just unbelievable how difficult it is to do even the simplest things with this disease.
