A Quick One This Time

Very quick post on the progress on backdrop painting. I shot few photos and put all together with Hugin as a panorama. Sorry for the very bad attempt of painting small towns on the distant hills in the center of the picture. I think I have to do a much better job there. Mountains are not that bad anymore, though. At least for me...

See you soon...

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...

Hills and landscape

I'm done painting clouds on the backdrop. Overall it came out not too bad. It's now time to think on how to paint the hills and the landscape. I still need to do some research to understand what one would see standing in the area I want to model. I've just played a bit with Google Maps and Earth.
Anyway, these are four photo I took last Sunday with my iPhone, so the quality it's not perfect.

See you soon...

Clouds Done, ehm almost

Yesterday I finished painting the left backdrop section and made few retouch on the right one. Now the sky and clouds are almost done. The backdrop of the central section still needs to be completed, though.

Overall I'm rather happy with the result. It could be much better for sure but it's been fun and it could have been much worse than that considering that this is my first time I try to paint something.

Here I added few (not really good) photos of the two completed sections.

More Backdrop Painting

See you soon...

More Clouds

Today I painted some more clouds on the backdrop of the right layout section. I tried to use a wider palette of colors adding some black to give more deepness to the closer clouds. Don't really know if I'm making any progress from my first attempts however painting clouds is fun and very relaxing.

Here are few shots of today's work.

See you soon...

Clouds in the Sky

Some clouds are forming in the sky. Well, that's not a problem, no rain is going to pour in the future.

No kidding, I made another attempt at painting a fading sky and some clouds. I think this time I got better and I'm rather happy with what I've got. I still have to work some more on it to paint more highlights and shadows and correct some areas where the sky color doesn't fade gradually from blue to white.

However, these are few shots. Take a look and comment if you will.

Here I faded the blue to white directly. The greater color difference is more visible and gives more depth than with a whiter blue as did before. The test cloud is better as well. Still not yet what I like.

Right side of the left layout section. A little too much white on the bottom I think. Clouds look better than the second test though.

Left side, other clouds that need to be completed with more highlights and shadows. It' getting better...

Front view of the left layout section. I thought different types of clouds would make the sky more interesting.

Here you can clearly see there's too much white on the bottom of the right hand side.

Some test on the plywood for the ground color.

See you soon...

Another attempt at painting backdrop

Last week I did another try to paint the sky on the backdrop. During last weeks I searched on the web for some how-to's and tutorials on how to paint realistic sky and clouds. I found many interesting sites and video. One I remember is the YouTube channel from Tim Gagnon where I found some well done videos on that subject.

Unfortunately, what seems easy and straightforward for Tim and artists in general turned out to be very hard for me. Anyway, I'll keep trying maybe I'll get something acceptable.

So far, I tried to paint a fading blue sky where the top is deep blue and the bottom fades to white in order to give the idea of the haziness and humidity that's more concentrated on the lower layer of the atmosphere. I think i did better that the first attempt but there's still a lot of space for improvements.

First time I used a whiter blue on top of the flat paint already dried out. Now, I used the whiter blue on top of a still-wet blue paint. It's better but still not much sense of deepness. Maybe I should use white paint instead of a whiter blue paint in order to have a greater difference in color between the top part -that's blue- and the bottom that's should be almost white. Let's see how it goes next time.

I also painted my very first cloud. To me it is awful. However, watching at Tim's videos once more I realized I had to wait for the first layer of white paint to dry before adding the additional layers to create brighter areas and shadows. May be next time I'll get something better.

See you soon...

More on painting backdrop

Not very much work done this week. Just a couple of hours on Sunday morning.

I wanted to give the backdrop a little more realism so I tried to paint the lower side with a fading white-blue color to represent the haze and humidity present on the lower layer of the atmosphere. I poured a part of blue paint I used so fare for the sky color into some white paint left over from the painting of benchwork legs, braces etc. I got a whiter blue color I put on a scrap piece of backdrop using an almost dry brush.

I'm not very convinced of the result and I need to experiment more on how to obtain something better, however in photo it doesn't look too bad. By the way, if you have any suggestion... would be much appreciated.

Here's the shot I took on the sample backdrop

I also worked on some cars substituting the plastic wheel-set with Fox Valley Models CNC-machined metal wheel-set I purchased recently. I still need the ones with shorter axis since I've got the 0.553" that fit Atlas trucks but not Intermountain and MicroTrains ones.

See you soon...

Installing Backdrop, part 1

Last weekend I started installing the backdrop. Before that I totally removed brackets and girders that were supposed to support the upper level since I decided to have just one level. Thinking about what to use for the backdrop the first idea was sheets of masonite. However, I thought a lighter material would be much better since it very important to keep the overall weight of each section as low as possible.

Then, few days ago, I read an article from Ryan Anderson in the last issue of Model Railroad Hobbyist Magazine about tips and link on how to improve the quality of photos and model railroad photography in particular. On one of the site Ryan mentioned I found a very interesting post on at least two ways to build a light tent to shoot better photos. One used sheets of coroplast for that purpose.
So, I thought coroplast could be a very interesting and much lighter alternative to masonite. I bought few 59" by 19" 1/2 sheets of coroplast and attached two of them to the legs of the left-side benchwork section. I used small pieces of double-sided tape that's strong more than enough for that.

Finally I painted a first layer of blue for the sky. It needs more paint to have a uniform color and I have to find some way to keep the backdrop more straight and aligned. However. I'm quite happy with the result and for sure it's very light.

See you soon...