Behind the thicket, the sky currently comes all the way to the ground, or at least all the way to the strip of wood the supports the LED strip that washes the sky. Wanting the thicket to continue past the wall, I cast about for a more distant wood that I could paint onto the backdrop.
I found a photo taken near Galetta when my dad, the kids and I went looking for one of the Canada Atlantic’s gravel pits. The Boy, who was about seven at the time, insisted on collecting rocks in a bucket, which he carried through the muggy miasma of July. We saw wild turkeys. The Boy picked up more rocks. We spotted cows. And, we found some odd hill formations that could have been a gravel pit a hundred years before. The real prize, though, was the time spent with my dad and his grandchildren. The photo from that day was a natural choice to pair with my brother’s thicket.
I traced the image in Inkscape, and cut out a test version to confirm the size. It was too small, and so I added another photo to the tracing and loaded the shape onto the Laser.
I primed the resulting piece of laser board — on both sides to avoid curling — with the same Rustoleum paint/primer that I applied to the tree armatures. Then I dusted off my painting skills and applied them along with some acrylic paint to approximate the shapes in the photo. I aimed more for the colours of the model than those of the photo so the background would blend with the foreground.
Nice story and the laser cut background is an idea I will want to play with. Meanwhile, your comment about painting and colour choice – blending to match the modelled foreground – leads into a topic I have been thinking about for a long time. Matching the lower edge of the backdrop scene to the modelled scenery is (obviously?) the best way to have the backdrop and model scene meld together without an obvious break. But I wonder about how far back the backdrop tree line will be relative to the foreground, and whether aerial perspective ever comes into play on a layout of low rolling hills and tree lines. It relates to another question that nags at me a bit – “Which way is the sun shining”? I’ve even thought about painting structures with a bluer shade side (but haven’t done it yet). Obviously during an operating sessions time changes and so for me it has been a bit of a dilemma; on my layout, what time of day should it be? If you’ve already wrestled with those elements I would be interested to hear more.