First layer of colour for the pasture

The pasture is moving along about as quickly as the Laurentian Ice Sheet that carved this landscape in real life. Having modified the land forms for the “last time,” I repainted them with my recycled house paint, sprinkled with sanded grout of the same colour. In the depression that has today sprouted a well, in […]

Pasture Backdrop Rough-in

I’ve always planned to make the backdrops for Pembroke out of aluminum flashing. Styrene would probably be easier to work, but I feel it will get brittle and start to break with time. Also, aluminum is shiny, which might help to gather more of the horizon light and cast it up towards the sky. As […]

Pasture smoothing

The rough pasture matured long enough beside its prototype photo to gain hash marks where material needed to be added or removed. So, with the weather increasingly bucolic and locomotive projects winding down for now, I mixed up a batch of Celluclay in the hopes of making the model look a little more like its […]

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 […]