Have been busy with house projects and Benjamin, but found some time to work on the layout backdrop. After talking with my Mom about mixing colors, went to the local craft shop to pickup a color wheel. While I was there I also picked up a few more acrylics and a book on mixing colors. Fooled around for a few weeks mixing different colors and practicing on some scrap ceiling panels. Finally this past week got enough courage to tackle the "real thing" (although it's easy to fix any mistakes - just paint over it!).
Using the color mixing book as I guide, I found some colors close to the Woodlands Scenic foliage colors I'll be using. According to some on-line articles as well as an acrylic painting book, adding some blue or purple to the color helps to make it look further away. The color wheel also helped with fading colors so they don't catch the eye quite so much.
The main colors I used were permanent light green, phthalocyanine green, and yellow. These were mixed with some cadmium red, purple and sometimes the sky blue latex of the sky. I wrote done the combinations that I liked so I can remix them as the layout grows. If you are painting your own backdrop, experiment with small amounts of color to find mixes that work well for the area you are modeling and the scenery materials you will be using.
Initially I used a dark green to paint the distance hills. Using a pencil, I lightly traced the top of the hills onto the sky painted backdrop. I then brushed on the dark green. Lots of brush stokes showed up as you can seen in the picture.
This is the area south of Enkenbach where the railroad will run under the Autobahn. I thought I might need to put on another coat to cover the brush strokes, but also thought the color variation might help with creating a light and shadow effect so I pushed on.
Using a toned down yellow, I added a few fields on the hills and then moved on to trees.
I mixed up three different colors of green for the trees. Using a flat brush with just a touch of paint, I jabbed the brush onto the backdrop along the ridge line. This gives what I think is a good impression of a distant tree, with some sky showing through the branches. Below the ridge I used a larger brush in the same manner, but with more clumps per tree. After putting on one color, I went back and added the other colors. You should wait for the first color to dry or you risk the colors blending together and creating a new color, rather than distinct patches of each color (different trees).
I have a few more areas to put the final colors on and then it will be done. As I add the foreground scenery, I might also experiment with gluing some foliage directly to the backdrop to represent not so distant trees. It looks ok on the test ceiling tiles, but we'll see.
The other photos show the area around Neuhemsbach. I added a short train pulled by my new V100 to see how it will all pull together.
(Btw - the V100 and coaches will be updated to Era IV with decals in the near future.)
