Well, I suspect in Toronto of the 1950’s, when coal still ruled as a fuel, there maybe weren’t a lot of bright blue sky days, but the first part of my backdrop is indeed a nice blue sky day.
Pre and Post painting panoramas of the layout room. The blue is Behr “Spacious Skies” from Home Depot, which was the palest blue tint that still looked blue to me.
From here, I plan on adding clouds by painting them on, using a technique from a TrainmastersTV video (subscription required). These are nice simple clouds, and what I need to add some sky texture behind the buildings that will fill large parts of the lower backdrop, filling the space so it doesn’t look blank, but not drawing attention away from the buildings and trains in the foreground. I can add some haze and other details as I move forward, I will also be painting at least a representation of the Mercer Reformatory (woman’s prison) as it fills a large area along the backdrop, but the buildings were set far enough from Liberty Street to not be modeled. My intention isn’t to create a photorealistic representation of the building, more a shadow in the distance with the prison yard fences and trees helping screen the view.
Painting clouds will be a down the road task. Up next is to install the foam board layer on top of the plywood. Once I have the foam layer installed on the plywood, I want to get mock ups of the buildings in place to help me guide where the horizon and clouds need to be, so that the backdrop helps fill in and make the space feel bigger behind the buildings and don’t draw the eye of a viewer away from what’s important in the foreground.
Taking Water at Rawtenstall on the East Lancashire Railway. It’s hard to see, but the water spray out the rear of British Railways (Ex-London Midland & Scottish Railway) Fowler 3F 0-6-0 is not overflow from the water filling, but the 3rd member of the crew spraying down the coal bunker to help control dust as they run.
Starting to work into the closet past the door frame. I trimmed a bit much and left a nasty gap to fill outside the closet.
The door fully framed around and filling the gaps. The area at the bottom where there is no styrene will be behind a building that will wrap around the door frame, so I didn’t bother to install backdrop there.
It looks something like a U3e, and will look a lot more like it by the time I’m done modifying it. May be while still before it gets to the top of the to-do pile, but it will get there.
A 4’x8′ sheet of 0.060 styrene. Showing the reason we didn’t build the peninsula initially, I wouldn’t have any room to work if it was in place, the sheet basically fills the open floor completely!!
The layout room, looking ever more layout-y (compare tonight in the bottom to where it started in top image). It also demonstrates that I will definitely need to do something about replacing the single off-centre light fixture (because of the large skylight centred on the room) with some form of track light to spread light around the room.