Better Mountains

Yet another installation on my "never ending" saga of backdrop painting. Yesterday I tried to get better looking mountains painting more ranges of hills farther and closer. It's better but not good enough yet. Closer mountains are still too uniform and dark however I could get a little more depth painting distant hills in lighter colors. This is a very bad photo taken with my iPhone of the backdrop section I worked on.

See you soon...

Backdrop Mountains and City of Oakland

Last weekend I had some spare time for my hobby so I worked on completing the backdrop painting. After the sky and clouds I begun with the mountains. Using Google Maps with the new feature similar to Google Earth I had a rough idea of the mountain contour around the area I'm modelling. I also found that many of the city building of Oakland, Ca have been rendered in 3D in Google Maps so I could take some screenshot of the city's skyline as one should see standing close to the 9th Ave Terminal Dock. Here are two screenshot I took:

And these are some photos of the mountains I painted so far:

Still not very happy with the result. I think that even if they should look quite far from the observation point they are too "uniform" and "flat". I think I should add some more color variation and texture to make them more realistic. Also, please forgive me for the mess I have in my garage. It's not that good to see.
This is a short video I took with my iPhone:

Lastly, this is a shot of the 9th Ave Terminal where I wanted to put the skyline of Oakland. I made a model using a sheet of paper. To me the buildings are too large and appear too close comparing with the mountains far in the back. I think I should shrink everything one third in order to have a more correct perspective.

Any suggestion is welcome.

See you soon...

Experimenting with Menu Bar and Static Pages

I'm trying to put a top menu bar and few "static pages" in this blog. I looked for hints and how-to in Google and so far it's not that bad, at least for me.

Watch for few more changes in the next days.

See you soon...

Layout Project, Version 2.3

Back again to the design stage.
During last weeks I found some very interesting images of the area I want to model, in particular from Bing.com aerial images. Some of them made me rethink my project since the area around what I called Pacific Rim Transport & Storage looks very different from what I designed.

These are some of the images I captured from Bing where you can see how the tracks are arranged.

The spur to serve the Ninth Ave Terminal building is on the sea side and it's made of two tracks with a runaround. So I decided to change the layout a little to have what I called version 2.3 (while this is the earlier version).

I also made few changes to the tracks close to Embarcadero Ave. and expanded the area covered by the sea water. Any feedback is warmly welcome.

See you soon...

Happy 2011!

Happy 2011 to all followers and readers of this blog.
Hopefully, this year I'll have a little more time for the hobby, I don't want to make unrealistic plans for the future, though.
So, let's see where I can get during the year just started...

Again Happy New Year to everybody.

See you soon...