There are times when building a layout when things seem to take months to make any significant difference, then there are weekends like this past one where you surprise yourself and think did I really do all that this past two days?
The weekend began with a list of tasks to get done. Over the past month or so I’ve build building out the river, hills and tunnel portal on level 2. The final job to do will be to pour the resin on the river but before we get there there is lots of smaller jobs to do.
Painting back scenes
First task of the weekend was to paint the distant hills and mountains on the back scene. While many layouts use photographic back scenes, I hand paint mine. Each scenic level has around 7 meters of back scene so any photograph would need to be massive. But more importantly, I want my back scene to compliment my railway scenery, I feel a photo back scene would be too detailed and look odd when sitting behind the layout, The back scene should compliment the layout and look part of the layout, not be the star.
I use blue emulsion paint for my back scene, and have a tin in the shed. When painting hills or trees on the back scene, the colour always starts with the blue emulsion. By mixing in blues, greens, browns, and a little black, I get a nice distant hill colour and because it is based on the sky blue it fits nicely and looks like it’s fading into the sky, I tend to do two layers of distant hills, the really far away, and the near hills which compliment the sculpted and plastered hills in the foreground.
Once the hills are dry I then paint in the distant tree lines, again mixing shades of green using the blue emulsion as a base. These trees don’t need to be too detailed as they are part of the background and much will be hidden by 3D trees. These 2D trees are really for filling gaps and giving a sense of distance and depth.
A mammoth session of static grass application then commenced. I tend to get most of my fibres from WWS, To get an autumnal hue that I like I used a base of 2mm winter grass with a covering of 4mm hay on top. I then apply a liberal scattering of Earth Blend powder to get the shade variation. I was really happy with the finished effect.
You may have seen in previous posts but you can definitely see the shadow in the images above. This would be addressed later in this post.
I had been making trees over the past few months and had around 50 ready to plant. They certainly didn’t take as long to plant!
The last job of the weekend was to address that annoying shadow cast on level 2. For lighting I used rolls of LED tape stuck to the inside of the fascia. I didn’t have a fascia between levels 2 and 3 so instead the LED tape was stuck to 1/2 inch thick timber which the fascia was to stick to. Unfortunately, the 1/2 inch timber lengths cast a shadow.
I popped out to B&Q to get some lengths of 3mm hardboard and cut them to cut to 20mm wide strips. I then removed the LED tapes, and the offending 1/2 timber lengths before installing the fascia. The light tape was then fixed to the inside of the fascia meaning the shadow cast was only 3mm, though in reality you can’t see one now.
The upper side of the installed fascia needs to be cut to shape then filled, sanded and painted to finish.
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