Ross Pollard, a Blue Earth resident, often works in the plaster medium. Above, he recently completed a model of a railroad tunnel portal which was featured in the latest issue of Railroad Model Craftsman, a national magazine about railroad modeling.

A Blue Earth man does a lot of work with plaster, but he is not making walls or putting casts on broken arms.

Ross Pollard is an artist and one of his favorite mediums is plaster ­- all kinds of different plasters – to do plaster modeling.

And now, one of his plaster models, and the story of how he created it, is featured in a national magazine about model railroading.

“I scratch-built an N-scale model of a railroad tunnel portal with a bag of plaster that I bought from Breen’s Hardware in Blue Earth,” Pollard says.

A story in this month’s issue of Railroad Model Craftsman has photos and a detailed step-by-step tutorial of just how he did it.

“I used a variety of plaster-working techniques,” he explains. “Including molding, casting, carving, scraping, and running, also known as wet-forming, in which a sheet metal template is pushed over wet plaster to create custom profiles.”

It has taken Pollard quite a few years of practice to master all the intricacies of plaster modeling.

He got his start with plaster model making 12 years ago, with the help of an old book.

“I found, and purchased, a book from the 1950s about the topic of plaster model making at a used book fair,” he says. “It covered everything from Ancient Egypt to modern times. Well, modern times then being 1950.”

He still has the book with many passages highlighted, and eventually mastered every single one of the techniques covered by the author.

As far as the model railroad tunnel portal goes, it is the start of several magazine projects Pollard is working on. He is creating items and techniques for a miniaturist hobby magazine, a plaster knife, pottery and a cameo style medallion. Another item is for a dollhouse craft magazine. All will have photos and tutorials.

Pollard has also self-published a book in 2022 that is a short guide to bas-relief modeling and working with plaster.

Some of Pollard’s work with plaster is to make bas-relief plaster models for casting bronze plaques and medals.

“An example is a Purple Heart plaque installed at the Martin County Veterans Memorial,” he says. “And various portrait medals for the Faribault County Historical Society, including one of Moses Sailor, first resident of Blue Earth, and small bronze art medals.”

One of his art medals, featuring a bison skull, will be exhibited at an art show in Florence, Italy, later this year in October.

Back to the portal which is featured in the model railroad magazine.

Pollard used many of his plaster modeling techniques to create the small tunnel portal.

He only uses hand tools in his work, except for a power lathe. He carved the letters which would go on the top of the portal in a piece of plaster, backwards, so that he could use it as a mold to make the top of the portal and have the letters be raised.

It is very intricate work. But the finished product turned out quite well.

“I didn’t just want to have a picture of the portal by itself in the magazine,” Pollard says. “So I made a little bit of model railroad layout to put it on.”

He purchased some N-scale track, a cheap N-scale locomotive and plastered some hills for the tunnel to come out of.

“I made the grass out of dyed sawdust,” he says. “And the trees are sticks with torn up sponges, from Breen’s, of course, for pine tree branches.”

For coloring and ‘weathering’ the portal Pollard used some pastels from the Blue Earth Pastels Company he and his father, Jim, own and operate.

Overall, Ross Pollard is pretty pleased with the way the project turned out and hopes he will get other plaster tutorials published in five or six other magazines soon.

“I enjoy sharing this knowledge of plaster modeling with a new generation of artists and hobbyists,” he says.