Studying the Copse

While waiting for The Girl to finish her roller skating class on Sunday, I had some time to sit in the car and study the copse to the left (north) of the pasture in more detail. Returning to Flickr, I had to find my reference material once again, and along the way, I amassed a […]

Pasture gets more shapely

Armed with a utility knife and a Stanley Surform, I hacked great swaths of Styrofoam away from the hills. It’s curious that so many modellers like this material. It’s messy and the dust sticks to everything. While easy enough to form it into hemispherical lumps, dips and bowls are difficult to form. Then, what if […]

Rough and Scrappy Scenery

There has been a pile of Styrofoam where the pasture belongs almost since the layout was installed. Indeed, I think that stand-in landform was a heap of scraps left over from the basement renovation. With the success of the mock-up, however, I was ready to commit to the scene. To support the test backdrop, I […]

Pasture Mockup

I sacrificed some brown paper bags, hot glue and an evening to see how the 3-dimensional elements of the pasture are going to work. Those brown paper bags were well-spent. The scene captures the spaciousness of rural Ontario delightfully. However, the real learning from the evening was around the edges: how should this scene relate […]

Mock backdrop enlivens the pasture

There is nothing quite like a coloured backdrop to bring a scene to life, even if it is tossed together in a hurry. I taped together a few pieces of Bristol board The Girl had left over from one of her projects. Then using a grid to keep proportions somewhat accurate, I quickly sketched the […]

Deep seeing the pasture

Despite finding a good pasture last summer, I remain drawn to an even nicer one that Barbara White shared on Flickr, and which I wrote about earlier last year. There is nothing quite like trying to reproduce something to make you look at it deeply, and as I’ve done only enough scenery modelling to know […]

Pursuing the Perfect Pasture

We just returned from a week of visiting family in Ontario – the first visit in two years. Because the family is too large to fit in any one of our houses, we usually rent a large cottage and stay there. This year, it was on Big Rideau Lake, near Westport. Aside from a trip […]

Burnstown Road Farm

For several years, one of my background tasks has been to look for inspiration for the scene beyond the roundhouse. I took a whole lot of pictures on our cross-Canada tour in 2018, but never found exactly what I was looking for, which is a pasture with a hill. These are important to tell the […]

Testing a new toy

My brother likes to get gifts that he would like to play with himself. So, when he learned that there is such a thing as static grass, well guess what I received for Christmas. I painted up a square of Styrofoam that has been lurking in a corner of the garage for half a decade […]

Inspiration for the spaces between

My recollection of August in Ontario is of a landscape weary of the summer’s heat and sun, but desperate to hold on rather than giving in to the autumn that is just around the corner. I remember the seed heads of ochre grass bobbing against my thighs as they launched grasshoppers whose wings flashed briefly […]