Enterprise refit arboretum

I can’t pretend that my arboretum is anything special. It simply serves the purpose of being something behind the arboretum windows on the engineering hull. I used the old PNT photo-etched set to add detail to the bulkhead walls. I had to scribe a channel for them to fit, otherwise they would not have been flush with the inset walking path.

I am, however, rather chuffed with the trees. The trunks and limbs of the deciduous trees are made from strands taken from 24 gauge wire. For the leaves I cut incredibly small chips of paper using silhouette scissors and stained with various shades of Vallejo paint. Diluted Elmers glue attached the chips to the wire strands. The coniferous trees are shaped lengths of pipe cleaners, again stained with Vallejo paint. The piled rocks are layered discs of paper. The smaller shrubbery is packing foam.

The roof of the arboretum has the cloud decals from the kit applied and various squares are left clear to allow light from above to light the arboretum. It won’t brightly lit the scene, but then I don’t think that’s desirable. The water effects is just some Pledge PFM acrylic floor polish.

I’m also proud of the colored paper cutouts I placed in the openings in the photo etch. I drew the door detail with a fine pencil. It’s not perfect but I think it’s perfectly acceptable when viewed through the windows.

Written by

Jennifer Petkus divides her time between writing Jane Austen-themed mysteries, creating websites for the dead, woodworking, aikido and building model starships. She has few credentials, having failed to graduate from the University of Texas with a journalism degree, but did manage to find employment at the Colorado Springs Sun newspaper as a cop reporter, copy editor and night city editor before the paper died in 1986. She has done little since. Her husband is the night editor at The Denver Post. Her best friend is a cop. She watched Neil Armstrong walk on the Moon live. She is the author of, Good Cop, Dead Cop: A Novel about the AfterNet. She’s writing the sequel, The Background Noise of Souls, and another AfterNet related story, Jane Austen’s Book Tour.

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