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….............................--- Scenery to Track Elevator – Part 4 ---

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Continuing on with the backdrop painting on the upper level going to the track elevator……...

I want to go back and redo some of the cloud work but also wanted to take a crack at painting the backdrop scenery as I wasn’t having much luck finding a local college art student to do the painting even though I’d pay them. Couldn’t get the art teacher to respond so couldn’t get to a student.

I started by spending an hour or so looking over PAINTING BACKDROPS FOR YOUR MODEL RAILROAD by Mike Danneman. I’d bought the book some years ago but hadn’t spent much time with it. It is good and I recommend it but for me it has one or two problems. One is that he is a very accomplished painter and the detail in his paintings is probably an unrealistic outcome for any of us that haven’t painted or painted very little in our past. He also tends to skip over steps that would be helpful for those of us with little experience in painting. Saying that though there is good information to be had from the book and I recommend getting it if you go down this road.

I also went back and watched parts of Dave’s ‘Calico Mountain Expansion Part 6: The Backdrop’ video. His style is a little different than what I want but still the concepts he talks about are of great help and strongly recommend the video and others he has. His video’s on using the stacked foam board were a big help to me.

I started by sketching in a rough idea of what I thought I wanted above and in the next image.

I stood back and was pretty satisfied where I was going to get out the paint.

As per what I’d seen and read I started with the more distant mountains. They are blends of the upper sky color along with white and some black.

Used some white for the snow and some green I had mixed with black and burnt umber (had a tube of this) to help give the impression of some trees down the slope some.

Next I moved onto the mesas in the foreground.

I have some paint in tubes that I kept from some years ago that went pretty much unused. I use it when painting some of my 3D printed items and brought it out for this also but hardly used any at this point. The burnt umber I mentioned above for the trees and the titanium white shown above but they stopped using it for all of my white (only small highlights).

What I did use is the acrylic latex house paint that I had bought for the foam scenery and what will also be used in this area below the backdrop. You can see it used earlier in the build ( HERE ). If you are interested in trying this I’d go to that link for more information on the paint and how I used it. I’ll be reviewing that myself next.

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Over all I’m happy with the backdrop but will be making some changes as described above.

I made a short 1 minute video showing the backdrop as it is now. Click on the image above or go ( HERE ).

To be continued…....

A link to this whole build ( HERE ).

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