Submitted by Slambo on Fri, 10/06/2006 - 06:23
When you start your backdrop painting, remember that you don't always need photo realism for rural or mountainous scenery. Often just a rough shape of the mountain in an appropriate color palette will be sufficient. Closer mountains will have colors that appear similar to your layout's scenery. However, keep in mind that distant mountains on the prototype appear in progressively bluer shades until the mountain is just a "purple mountain majesty" in the distance, so you don't necessarily want to use the same colors as your foreground scenery.
Submitted by Slambo on Fri, 04/14/2006 - 07:23
What color is green? When you're adding scenery to your layout, slight variations in the colors will help give a more realistic appearance. This photo was taken in late May 2003 from the back of the Algoma Central's er Wisconsin Central's um Canadian National's train through Agawa Canyon.
Submitted by Slambo on Sat, 01/21/2006 - 17:43
Once you've gotten to the point in your modeling where you've got trains running, it's time to start thinking about building the scenes through which your trains will run. If you've planned your scenes based on a specific prototype, then you already know what kind of vignette you need to build. If you're proto-freelancing, then you've probably got a good idea of the kind of scene you need to build. If you're just building something to look better than bare plywood, well, think about what kind of terrain you've imagined the trains operating through. Once you know what kind of terrain you're going to build, how do you do it? Here's one method to get the first landforms in place on your layout.
Tools and materials required
The items you will need (in approximately the order that you will need them) for this process are as follows:
