Painting Backdrops Continued

I devoted my layout work this weekend towards backdrops. I was able to complete the backdrops from Falmouth to Stoneman's Switch.

I used several pieces of Brian Kamerer's art composited with my painted skies and background painting. I used Photoshop to resize and move elements around to best fit the intended location.

Then I printed sections of Brian's art sections on my 13x17 inch Epson 1400 printer. I cut out the scenes, touched them up as needed with pen or paint and glued them to the backdrop using spray adhesive.

In some cases I used acrylics to paint the scenes surrounding the cut-outs to make them fit. Overall, I think it worked out very well and the redone backdrop behind looks good. I also like the way the creek bed and hill by Stonemans came out. Brian's art is full of intricate detail with many soldiers, horses and wagons that would be tedious and difficult for me to paint. Many thanks to Brian for letting me use his art.

This is a view of the freight house in its new location at Stoneman's Switch.

That is spline roadbed in the foreground. I am trying to get the backdrops done before proceeding with track and finished scenery. However, I am roughing in the terrain forms before putting down the track. It seems more logical to me this way.

The brakeman's view. A shot with the iPhone resting on the deck of a flat car - just for fun.

More Pine Trees, Lacy House and a Stub Turnout Video

Rob had one more night in town so he continued to make trees. Thanks to his 5 new pines, the layout now has double its inventory of trees. The latest is a particularly impressive double trunk, mature pine with a carved nebari. We'll have to make sure all the trees have similar root structure.

The figure standing next to the tree gives a sense of the size. It is a 40mm ACW figure that stands about 1.7 inches tall.

I continued to paint the backdrops. Tonight I added Lacy House (now known as Chatham House, a National Park Site). The house on the backdrop is a colorized cutout from a photo of the actual Lacy House overlooking Fredericksburg.

I painted a large splotchy grassy lawn surrounding the house since it was the estate of a wealthy Virginian that has been trampled by thousands of Union soldiers.


The Union doctors used the house as a hospital after the battle of Fredericksburg. Over 100 soldiers were buried on the grounds (most were later moved to the National Cemetery). Before the war the estate had many out buildings and lush forests. Union soldiers cut most of the trees for firewood. They even stripped some of the wood paneling for fuel. The few period photos of Lacy House do not show any out buildings near the main house, so I placed it alone on the hill.

The foreground scenery will eventually also get some grass ground cover, so hopefully the colors will match.

This is the colorized photo of Lacy House from the 1863 time period. I colorized it in Photoshop, but had to add some acrylic paint to increase saturation to match the rest of the backdrop. The colorized print was too unsaturated.

I am undecided on how to proceed with painting the rest of the Falmouth backdrop. Should I continue the distant scene or have a more detailed, closer representation like I had with the computer printed backdrop? I may try the former and see how it goes. The beauty of had painting is I can change if i decide it's not working.

Here is a video that shows the operation of the stub turnouts on my layout.

Southern Yellow Pine Trees

One of the advantages of having a brother who is a world renowned expert in the art of bonsai trees is having him help you make trees for your layout.

My twin brother Rob lives in Melbourne Florida. He is a member of several bonsai tree organizations and is an officer in the International Bonsai Society. A few years back he won the North American Bonsai Championship that granted him an expense paid trip to see the Japanese emperor's private bonsai collection in Tokyo. He has had several other international awards for bonsai tree excellence. He has traveled all over the world to lecture on bonsai tree art. He also wrote a book on bonsai trees. What better guy to have help build model trees?He has a blog with more info about his bonsai hobby.Mahogany Row Studios

He is on a business trip this week to Virginia, so I put him to work making model trees for the layout. He made two yellow pines. One an immature tree to match the trees on the backdrop. The other a larger specimen.

Yellow Pine is a term for several closely related species of pine with yellow tinted wood, including the Southern Yellow Pines (Loblolly Pine, Slash Pine, Shortleaf Pine, etc.), and the non-Southern yellow pines (Ponderosa Pine, Jeffrey Pine, etc.) and several others. More than one of these species may occur at any one site, with the term 'yellow pine forests' typically used in forestry and ecology to describe such forests or stands that contain more than one of these species. In the area of Virginia I am modeling Shortleaf and Loblolly Pine are quite common.

The models use carved wood trunks from either balsa or basswood. The trunks should taper toward the top, with a bulge for nebari at the base. Nebari means exposed roots in Japanese. We will add the roots once the trees are installed on the layout. The trunk gets textured with a rasp to create the bark. Yellow pines can have a tall thin trunks with a crown of limbs at the top. The lower branches self prune.

The branches are pieces of caspia that are inserted in holes drilled in the trunks. We use CAA to hold the branches. Some wood putty is useful in shaping the branches. The jin are the dead branches at the lower section of the tree. The jin have a detectable tapper.

Once the branches are in place, we insert a nail in the bottom to act as a means to secure the tree to the scenery. They they get a spray coat of black and flat brown paint. Once the spray paint is dry, we dry-brush the trunks with a medium gray with some brown mixed in.

The needles are static grass applied with hairspray. Multiple coats does the trick.

The final step is to paint the needles with a light spray of conifer green.

Fredericksburg

I painted a representation of Fredericksburg on the backdrop behind Falmouth tonight. I took a little liberty with the geography as one cannot see Fredericksburg from the railroad location at Falmouth, as the railroad is located at the bottom of a small ravine. Fredericksburg is on the other side of the hill and across the RappahannockRiver. Nonetheless, I thought that adding the town scene might help improve the overall layout context.

The large barn-turned-church is a cutout of an ACW photo. This is just a test to see how it looks. I printed this on light weight paper. If I decide to use it, I'll reprint on heavy stock. I'll also use photoshop to colorize the image. For this test I just used some color markers.

Repainted Backdrop

After thinking about the issue, I decided today to repaint the section of backdrop behind Falmouth. This section had a backdrop made using computer printed vinyl.

While it looked great, I could not figure out how to proceed with it on the rest of the layout to have it match, etc. as I discussed earlier. So I painted over it.

I tried removing the vinyl by peeling it off, but it was very solidly attached. It actually was ripping the paint off the surface underneath. So, I left most of it on, and painted over it with two coats of Kilz Primer and then two coats of sky blue. I painted some clouds and the basic horizon line. I started to added some detail, using some of Brian Kammerer's artwork as cut-outs attached with glue. More of that work remains.

One of the key changes on the new backdrop is the lower horizon. This is oriented toward a track level versus birds eye view of the scene. The difference can be seen in the two sample photos here. The top photo is the design view point, while the second photo is the birds eye. I think the track level view is much more realistic.

In studying photos of the area, I concluded that southern yellow pine trees were quite prevalent in the area I am modeling. So I took a crack at modeling them and painting them on the backdrop. I had been focusing on deciduous trees heretofore.

The tree in the foreground is an armature for a model pine. The next step will be to add dark green static grass to simulate the pine needles. On the backdrop are some quite large deciduous trees. I like the way they came out.

This tree on the left has the needles applied. This tree is about 16 inches tall, or about 64 scale feet tall.