That was fun. Back to work.

Ok the faux news flash was fun but lets get back to work.  Twice in the last week the inferiority of some embossed texture papers has come up.  Brother bought me some MicroMark bricks for Xmas.  Well besides the laugh, I was astonished to see just how bad they looked.  The embossing is little more then some random bumpyness.  Very uncrisp.  I do think the paper would have looked better without it.  It was distracting and made the texture look undefined.  The printed image itself was booring and unrealistic. Then today, I had to respond to a post at the MRR forums.  A gent there is scratch building a very nice grainery.  I made a comment earlier in the thread about how much i liked it.  I have been watching and thinking how much better it would look using our textures but kept my tongue silent.

Just yesterday he covered the foundation in MicroMark embossed stone paper. I was unimpressed and so were lots of others.  The negative coments about paper were flying. well I couldn’t sit still for that, so I did a bit of retouching on the posted pic.  Obviousty it’s real low resolution, but I tried to make the retouched pic as fair a representation as possible.

Here are the results.

MicroMark’s.  Notice that the patern repeats 4X across the wall.

Our’s.  Notice no obvious repitition of pattern. (It does repeat, just not obviously.)

Next post, I’ll talk about embossing and how you can do it yourself. (if you must)

Comments

[Marc Witen]

Thom theres no comparison with yours and micromark,yours is way better,if i couldn't use yours i would use Paper Creek's which brings me onto there demise,thats a shame cause there website was good the building tips i thought were excellant in fact there's was the first overseas printed paper i used,infact it was Tarpaper ,corrugated sheeting and red painted timber,all of which where excellant i made two models a shed based on a plan from Tom Yorke,and a saw fillers hut on a chassis by Al Armitage,both of these where sent to Gary Kohler of Light Iron Digest,who i believe still has them,i sent them so he could take to a show,the year before or it could of been last year.,Have some new pics for you will post in a day or two,regards Marc

[Dave]

Always look forward to pictures form you Marc. i have been playing with embossing by hand. i use a burnisher with a small ball end and put the paper of a surface that has a little give like a softer paper. Fore stone i start on the front and press in on the grout lines. not too hard just enough to get a little deformation and i don't do the whole sheet just a few areas a couple of inches diameter.
Then flip the paper over and with a bigger burnisher i can push out some stones using the marks i made on the front as a guide.

I'll have to copy this to the blog!

Thom