I've shown pictures recently of all three "palettes" - hatch covers -- I've made for a duck-under popup access hole in my layout's northern end. The soccer-field-turned-classic-car-show I posted a week or so is nice, and the "secret rocket base," when done, will definitely be the most fun, but I think my favorite is this simple mountain lake. It is so pretty - and cherished memory from the '50s: Dad, my brother, and I have left Mom to her weekend bridge tournament and taken my Dad's Pontiac up into the mountains, where we've rented a fishing boat and are camping in the woods. It really never got any better than that.
One of the realities of building a layout that I have come to appreciate is the huge gap between "trees" and "a forest": I put a tree or two or three or four in places and it looks nice -- I've added some trees. But when I add more it doesn't help - in fact it looks weird -- too sparse to be a forest -- I had to keep adding and adding trees - making two extra trips to my LHS and finally buying every pine tree they had and two kits to make my own. It took 254 to make this area into a satisfactory "forest." I got really tired of drilling holes and gluing each in place - But it was worth it for the look.
