As promised in my response to Alan's welcome message, I'm going to start offering some posts offering my thoughts on paper modeling and sometimes other topics. I figured the best place to start would be to provide some background about how we got started with paper modeling and the Scenery Sheet product in the first place. My wife is an avid scrapbooker and makes frequently trips to craft stores like Michael's and AC Moore. I spent most of these trips in a Zombie like state following her up and down the isles pushing the cart. However, during one trip I looked up long enough to notice a sheet of scrapbook paper with a brick pattern. I bought a few sheets and ended up using it to create a retaining wall on the layout in our store.
The result wasn't too bad and I started to discover some of the applications of scrapbook materials in model trains (that's a topic for another day). However, scrapbook paper hasn't a few drawbacks. It only comes in 12x12 sheets and is generally not designed to overlap or tile without a visible seam. It's also generally very thin and not as photo realistic as we'd often like in railroading. I could definitely see the potential applications of a paper based product on an O gauge layout though.
That's when I started playing around with my own images. My goal was to create a photorealistic image that was flexible enough to be overlapped or tiled so that I could do larger areas using multiple sheets. After many hours in Photoshop I came up with four basic brick sheets - dark, light, aged and black. After some experimenting on my own layouts I figured I had something worth pursuing. The paper based sheets were much less expensive than using imprinted styrene and a lot more flexible.
When we decided to start selling the product, we immediately made the decision that the sheets should be professionally printed using a traditional four color process. It supports the photorealistic imagery and produces a much more consistent product. It also allowed us to offer the sheets on thicker stock paper with a coating for better durability and print the images to the edge so less cutting is necessary.
At first I mainly designed Scenery Sheets related to landscaping - brick for walls, water, grass, rock, sand, etc. We also introduced the road system which proved to be some of our most popular designs. It wasn't too long, though, before I started turning brick walls into brick buildings. That led to the development of several other building materials such as wood, siding, metal, etc. and complimentary products such as window, door and roof sheets. The great thing about using these sheets for building is that you can essentially build to fit any need or footprint size.
So that pretty much brings you up to speed on how we got to where we are now. We're constantly creating new designs, such as more brick variations, concrete, etc. We're also developing some ways to make building with the sheets even easier by better integrating windows and other elements. If you have an idea for a specific pattern please let us know. Please also post or send photos of anything you create using the sheets.
And thanks again for making us feel so welcome on the forum.
