Pembroke Compositions

Mike Cougill’s excellent post about story influencing layout design brought back some thoughts I jotted down about composition, and that take on new significance as I think about the layout’s role in the room. Mike’s layout tells a completely different story from Pembroke, but perhaps we can both take some lessons from the art world […]

Art Nouveau

“What’s with the sudden interest in Art Nouveau?” my wife asked when she saw me balancing on my knee the huge tome I’d liberated from the oversize stacks at the Capilano Library. Art Nouveau was a dominant style in the arts from 1890-1910 and so it is part of the context for my 1905 rendition […]

Ted Rose’s lessons

The arrival of Lance Mindheim’s book on my doorstep this week almost makes me want to stop talking about applying lessons from art to railway modelling. But, well, it’s kind of fun, and Dave Eggleston reminded me that we were going to look at a couple of Ted Rose’s wonderful watercolours to see what we […]

Lessons from art school

Earlier this week, Dave Eggleston posted some of his notes from his classes with Charles Emerson. It’s a super list of attributes that make a painting good, and I wondered if we can apply any of these same lessons to elevate our model railways and railway models. A good painting is logical and consistent across […]