Blending the background

If I’m honest with myself, I might be procrastinating. I do this whenever there’s a new skill to develop and apply and I’m nervous about getting started. However, I convinced myself that the background should be blended with the landscape before starting on static grass. The blending started with a small piece of blank backdrop, […]

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 […]

Backdrop epiphany

In response to my hack-job about composition, Neil Erickson sent over an in-progress photo of his layout that he likes. It is a simple, entirely railroady scene, quite similar to the painting of a train I showed in that post. I quite like the oil painting varnish on the photo; I’m not sure if that’s […]

Clouds

Most of my railroad time this week was spent on painting the clouds. Like everything else, I got better at this as I went along, and so, I kind of did it about one and a half times. I roughed the clouds in on Sunday with some plain white paint, and they looked pretty flat […]

Constable it Ain’t

Tonight I painted a base layer for the clouds. They’re definitely going to take a second layer before the white covers over that hideous not-quite-gradient of blue that I put up there. As this is only the base layer, I didn’t bother with any shadows, and so, the clouds have no form yet. So, it […]

Well Now it Just Looks Like a Crappy Paint Job

Can you believe that I was so cocky as to claim that I thought I knew what I was doing when it came to painting a gradient on the sky? Yeah, me neither. Tonight I painted the second coat. It only really needed it because there were some thin areas up near the corners, and […]

Learning as I go: the Sky

It looks like the sky is going to want two coats, which is good because by the time I got to the bottom, my technique had become much better. My basic blue is “Utah Sky” (2065-40) from Benjamin Moore, but there is very little of the straight colour up there. As others have proposed before […]

Smoothing the Sky

I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve sanded the backdrop now. There is at least one more time in my future as the velour mini roller, which the manufacturer describes as follows 100% wool velour extreme short nap rollers provide a very smooth finish and are virtually lint-free. Velour has excellent loading and uploading […]

Smoothing out the Backdrop

This morning, before leaving for work, I sanded the second layer of drywall mud on the backdrop. It’s looking pretty good now, but I’m sure glad I hired someone to do the drywall on the rest of the basement (Amazon Contracting were excellent by the way; if you need drywall in Vancouver, look them up […]

Next two pieces of backdrop

Tonight Andrew and I managed to get the next two pieces of backdrop up. The curve on the right is a 3′ radius, and was much easier to accomplish with the quarter inch Masonite. As with the sharper curve at the other end, we made a couple of plywood formers to support the curve. The […]