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...

New Rolling Stock

After quite a long time a couple of Picasa web albums of my last two shipments of new rolling stock. Some very nice TOFC cars from Athearn and a bunch of SP and UP insulated boxcars from Red Caboose.

You can have a look here:

New Rolling Stock

New Rolling Stock

See you soon...

Ballast Tests

After quite a long time I'm back to my blog with few updates. I did very few work lately on my layout, just a couple of "side projects".

Using few pieces of scrap wood I built a small rack to hold few glass containers (jars?) I used to hold the various kind of Woodland Scenics ballast I bought some time ago along with few mix test I did to find the right ballast color for my railroad.

After that I wanted to experiment with ballasting track so I took an old (almost 30 years old) piece of HO sectional track and a piece of my code 55 N track. I glued them on two pieces of scrap wood and start testing to ballast track and also to find the right colour/mix of ballast.

Ballast on the left is with the tan fine ballast while on the right is a 50%/50% mix of grey and light-grey.

Here on the left is all grey ballast.

Here you can see all three tests: grey on the left, tan in the middle and the 50%/50% mix on the right.

That's it for now, see you soon...