Missouri, Kansas, & Texas Railroad along the Missouri River by Cathead - 1/87 (HO) scale - model railroad with steamboat

[Cathead]

5 hours ago, Keith Black said:

once you have the town and foliage in place then decide.

I partly have to decide sooner, since once I've placed trees in front of the backdrop I'm not easily going to be able to remove them again or get behind them to redo the backdrop.

 

1 hour ago, kgstakes said:

With a fall scene it is really hard to make it look convincing with painted trees in the background.

I agree, but I also relish the challenge and the distinctive look! Your photos look awesome.

 

1 hour ago, wefalck said:

It is always a good idea to hide the line between the background painting and the 3D-foreground with some 'props' such as trees, hedgrows, fences etc.

Yes, this is the general plan in most places. The most exposed seam will be where roads go directly into the backdrop and I have yet to decide if I'm going to try and have them blend into the distance or just go blank. The problem with a town scene in which most of the town is just behind the backdrop is that it feels all or nothing; if I paint on a receding road, there needs to be receding buildings, too, and I'm not sure I'm up for getting that right. Something that looks wrong is often worse than something just not being present, since the eye and mind will fill in missing detail but will notice wrong-looking detail.

 

1 hour ago, wefalck said:

Somehow, I have the feeling that the cliffs left and right continue as painting on the background - perhaps you can continue with the same style of painting as on the 3D-feature for a few inches and then let the cliff details become increasingly faded?

That's what I did...the bare bluffs receding on both the left and right sides use the same paint/pastel mix as the foreground plaster rocks. I'm pretty happy with how those transitions turned out; at the very least I don't think I can improve it.

 

Another challenge in such backdrops is that viewers see them from so many different angles that there's no one "right" perspective. Viewed from one angle, a receding bluff line or creek can look great, and viewed from another angle, can be at an awkward angle. Very different from a true "flat" painting in which the perspective more or less stays the same no matter how it's viewed. For better and worse, I've mostly tried to orient the perspective from a trackside view, such that certain things look a bit "off" when viewed from a normal standing angle. 

[Cathead]

Apologies for ghosting this log. Summer has continued to push us hard, with relatively little persona time. I do have two updates to write up, the shorter of which I'll do here, the longer of which I'll need more time for.

 

I've moved forward with a bit more scenery work, mostly laying down base layers in the eastern part of town. Here's the current status:

 

This is trying to replicate the pattern clearly seen in historic photos, of the depot area having a much lighter layer of ground cover (some form of sand/gravel) than the rest of the area. The foreground area will become a rough farm field; much of the area south of the tracks was functionally in the river's floodplain and had small farm plots on it. You can also see that I've filled in the road east of the depot and added a rough version of the stock pens along the spur behind the depot. Here's a photo of this area in the early 1900s.

 

A couple closeups: here are some of the grade crossings, laser-cut wood castings that I weathered.

 

And here's the stockyard part of the spur.

 

Both the road and the spur's ballast are finished with sand from my local stream, sifted to a grain size I want. The stockyard is a cheap plastic modular kit; down the road I'll want to rebuild this from scratch using wood, but I had this sitting around, and adapted it to fill the space for now. At some point I'll use an airbrush to do some weathering on it.

 

This all continues to look like Montana until I get more vegetation on it, but that's down the road yet. But at least I'm slowly moving forward with filling in the blank surfaces with something at least resembling scenery. Thanks for sticking with me on this! Look for a longer post at some point on my first test runs of an operating scheme for this town.

 

 

 

 

 

Edited yesterday at 02:23 AM by Cathead

[Cathead]

So it looks like I screwed up that last post. There was supposed to be a historic photo in there, and that last photo wasn't supposed to be there. Please go reread it now so you can actually see the old photo that shows the lighter-colored ground cover around the depot, the small fields across the tracks, and so on.