If you've been paying attention at all, I've said that the town of White Haven goes back from the tracks for about 7 blocks up to the top of the hill where Rt. 940 runs over I-80 south of town. I'm trying to get the impression of depth on a hill in about 2-ft of real depth that I have before I hit the wall of my office. I've also said that I'm going to try to attempt some tricks to make the town believable. The key to that is a great backdrop. But here's the problem - I'm not great with a paintbrush. Don't get me wrong, I've done some nice work on my backdrop to bring wooded mountains to life, but they didn't include man-made structures and detail. That's my problem at the moment - how to go about the creation of the illusion without painting talent.
So, the internet is a wonderful thing - full of pictures that I should be able to use as suitable printed backdrops for White Haven, a town of older dwellings situated on a hill during the late summer or early fall. Should be easy, right? Not so much. There are a ton of photos of homes for sale where the structure takes up most of the picture - ok for a flat picture to mount to a board for a background structure, but how about the green stuff that goes around it? And how about the correct lighting? And how about modeling the 1970's? No Hyundai Santa Fe in the driveway will work. I thought about some aerial photography like Microsoft Maps used to have, but couldn't find that app anymore. There's also Google Map features that put you in a car and drive you around roads, and I did get a couple of actual White Haven structures and road intersections that I might be able to use, but the scale isn't quite right. Tried other towns but nothing's really working for me. I couldn't for the life of me come up with the answer and spent a good week puzzling over it. How to proceed? I was stuck.
The inspiration for what to do next was provided by that dude that used to paint on PBS every weekend (Bob Ross). I don't think I've watched him for a full show, but I do remember that he said that in painting any landscape, you start from the back and work forward, painting over the background pieces until, wah la, you're finished. So, that's how I'm going to approach this backdrop problem. First, I needed some mountains in the deep background, so I took a pencil and layered in some standard Appalachian profiles. I labeled them as either 'D', 'M' or 'F' for Deep, Medium, or Front and then got my paints out. Some of that is rather therapeutic today because I have a toothache and the earliest my dentist will be able to do something about it is Monday - I need something to take my mind away from the pain. The 'D' mountains will be most distant and will be a mottled gray/green. The 'M' mountains will be a darker dappled green, and the 'F' mountains will be semi-detailed to make you think you might be about to make out tree forms. I already had some pre-mixed 'D' paint, so armed with a cheap chip brush from Harbor Freight, I painted the deep mountains in about 2 minutes. (Note to self: Cheap chip brushes from Harbor Freight shed their bristles like my head sheds hair. Don't use them for detail work - I had to remove at least 4 or 5 bristles from the paint on the backdrop.)
Pulled a little of that paint into another take-out tray from the Chinese food place here in town and added some Hunter Green and Black to make it darker and then slapped both the 'M' and (even darker) 'F' mountains. Once that dried, I added detail to the 'M' mountains using my Impressionist technique (splotch a bunch of different paint blobs onto the mountains until they look reasonable. I also added a few small structures (at least the illusion of them in a few locations) to simulate the outlying buildings around the town). These consisted of a gray swipe to simulate the roof and a bit of color below (yellow, white, red to simulate buildings of different colors). I later went back and added the illusion of windows and doors with a small brush.
And then it was time to address the 'F''s - the foreground hills. I hesitated there. I figured that if I painted them, I should add a decent level of detail - not a bunch of splotches of paint. The trees on the 'F' mountains should look like trees. Thus, I decided to do a little research into easy ways for poor artists to paint trees.
It turns out that my hesitation was a good thing. I woke up a couple of times with my tooth throbbing a bit and started thinking about my Google drive-around-White-Haven-in-a-car photos. The shots I thought I was looking for were a long string of buildings at the top of the hill facing the river, but what if I simply took the street view looking up the hill and captured those buildings fading into the distance beyound my last set of buildings? Wouldn't that work? I went back to sleep, woke up late, took the dog for a walk, went and bought a few Christmas presents, watched Penn State take out Rutgers (what a relief...), cleaned the bathrooms and then started to look for the shots I wanted. Turns out it was a combination of two different streets:
Cutting out the buildings on the right side of the Wilkes Barre street and the buildings on the left of the Berwick Street photo. I then stuck them at the top of my version of Berwick Street on my layout and I think it could work as a backdrop with a bit more cutting, bending, and mounting on some sort of board in front of my backdrop.
I cut the blue horizon off each picture.
Roughed out a piece of card stock to mount the photos to,
Cut to shape and glued each picture on the board...
The sort-of-finished product! It actually looks even better in person. The human eye tends to ignore the edges and it really looks like the road goes pretty deep into the layout.
I have two or three streets that do the same thing on my layout, so I thought I'd just try to find other up-the-hill photos to put at the ends of those like Berwick Street, but it was just a bit much - too many roads going off into the deep distance close to one another and looking like they diverged in angle. I decided to use one of the cutouts I did actually get from the Google drive that were looking at the fronts of buildings on Church Street. I also added a couple of other separate buildings next to the Church Street set, and I at least ended up with something a little different that worked.
Once I got these background flats set the way I liked them, it was time to address the foreground hills again (you recall I hesitated in trying to paint them). So, I had an idea of revisiting a brilliant idea for "flat mountains" that I stole out of a Model Railroader magazine from January 1996 (you can visit that one-page article here). But here's the gist - a friend of the author (Bill Henderson) had a part of his layout where he needed to put a hill - he just didn't have much depth to do so. He found a picture from a calendar that he used for a while, but the photo gave off a glare when he photographed it. He decided to put polyfil fiber in front of the photo to break up the gloss of the photo and decided he like the polyfil better. He then started to experiment by adding some other things to the polyfil (sticks, green foam, lichen), and ta-da, the flat hill was born. I used this idea for a mountain area previously on my layout and loved the result, so I figured I'd try again on this area of White Haven.
Dug into my supplies and found that I still had a few sections of spray-painted polyfil fiber (I bought a bag of white polyfil that pillow stuffers and quilt makers use from WalMart for under $10 years ago, and it's provided a whole lot of scenery effects over the years. I stretch the polyfil out until it's quite thin, spray paint it black (black is cheap paint and it covers the white color of the polyfil), and then go back after it dries and hit it with a variety of greens. So, I stretched out the green-painted polyfil (much cheaper than the pre-tinted green stuff you get from scenery suppliers), until it was pretty thin.
Got my can of spray adhesive and hit my painted hill where I wanted to adhere the polyfil, and they stuck it to the backdrop.
Relaid my photo backdrops where they needed to go, and the results are great - it almost looks like a forest of individual trees with almost zero effort. A few additions of sticks (to simulate tree trunks, lichen and colored turf and it's going to look fantastic.
My efforts (now that the backdrop scenery is about finished is focus on the scenery around each and every building and rock outcrop between the backdrop and the tracks. Key new things for me to learn are using the Woodland Scenics Roadbuilding kits - looking forward to that!
I thought that would be it for things associated with the backdrop. I was wrong. When I placed the pieces, I just sort of propped them in place and didn't think I'd have to worry about keeping them in place. I was wrong. If it was simply a matter of gluing them to the Masonite backdrop that could probably be easy, but there is a layer of polyfil in the way between them. I tried air-nailing it in place but the nails went right through the cardboard backing. Didn't hold. Then I thought about Velcro. I had some adhesive-backed stuff in my workshop and lo and behold, the hook type latched right onto the polyfil to keep the cardboard vertical.
I also needed to touch up the the Google-inserted "Berwick Street" lettering on the backdrop section above.
I mixed up some dark gray paint and painted that.
I tried securing this longer backdrop strip with Velcro, but it kept tipping forward, so I secured it with a screw and a block of wood between the cardboard and the backdrop. Finito!
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