Sunday Scenic Showcase May 7, 2017

Gorgeous!

Peter

 There are always those areas of the layout that never get photographed. Whether it be bad lighting or tough to access. The area below had neither for an excuse. It's tough to execute some scenes where a wall comes into play on a narrow shelf. The layouts edge just ends in air and your left to your imagination as to what's there. One the other hand. A wall is plainly visible. You can do mountainscapes or buildings. Both work well. But it's tough to disguise a road. For 20 years I had cutouts of Pioneer Valley backdrops. I tried to match building angles and even tried hand painting a disappearing road. The background wasn't an actual picture. More like drawings. Okay viewing at a distance but just to close to the other scenery to make it believable.

  What I did is nothing that new or inventive. I purchased some flats from Angie's Trackside Flats. I've used their HO ones behind existing scenes in the city. They are actual photos but have sort of a matt finish and seem to blend well with my existing structures. I painted up a scrap piece of MDF for the road. Leaned the flats up against whatever was handy and got them plumb. Used some autos from the layout to space everything out to actual dimensions so everything looked right distance wise. Did all this on the kitchen table and just shot it with my IPad. I don't really I have much skill when it comes to this. The girls at Staples were very helpful. I had it printed on 12x18 mat paper. Trimmed it out with an X Acto knife. At certain angles it looks off.  Buildings with more depth that would block viewing angles would probably pull it off better. The flats I bought will hopefully be recycled into the layout somehow. For the price of some free time and 10 bucks I feel I got a lot of bang for my buck from a before to after scenery wise.

I have a couple more waiting to be picked up today. I'm working my way down the layout in the city portion. I may add something behind the bowling alley. Some rooftops and maybe the upper floors of some taller structures. Not just limited to using flats. I have an overpass that sits at an angle. Couldn't use flats. Needed a full building. Or at least 2 sides to pull it off. I removed a large structure and found a winding road on the layout that might work. I placed the structure on stools and boxes to get the correct height. The road will disappear behind a tall building to the left of the road. Below is what I'm using. If it's a miss. I'll try to correct what's wrong visually and just restate it. If the road isn't a perfect match you can hide it with maybe some foreground scenery. At 10 bucks a pop and really not much skill level in doing this as to how it's going to turn out. I'm going with the good enough approach.

Excellent work, fellows. 

I'm bogged down with building my tug boat, but I did manage to tart up the area around my stone shed, with some lobster pots I've been waiting on from the UK, and some random "fishy" trash.

I've already posted these elsewhere, but I think that they'll fit in here as well.

Here goes . . .

While I don't possess the scratch building skills on display here here's my addition to the thread

Ever since I picked up the Dep't 56 Budweiser Brew House I had been looking for stable to house a team of Clydesdale my wife gave as a Christmas present.  Any ceramic barns or stables were as big if not as tall as the Brew House itself.  On a visit to a LHS I came across this Walther's HO Dayton Machine Co. and the idea of converting it to the stable was born.  The door is sized for HO scale freight cars but looks right for O scale horses and wagons.  It sat for quite a while before I started work on it.  While the original in St. Louis is round and more red in color I believe the brown brick compliments the color of the Dept 56 brew House.  I added the Clydesdale Horsehead reliefs as on the original by gluing a picture to an appropriately sized clothing button to give them depth like the original, used Belgian block scrap book paper for the floor, an appropriately scaled photo of a stable interior adds stalls and I replaced the two incandescent bulbs with three warm white strip leds.  The warm white were still too bright so I had to tone them down with a dab of Tamiya clear orange paint.  Over all I think I hit what I was aiming at.  I may hit it with a gloss coat to try to match the ceramic glaze but I'm not sure about that yet.

Dave,

Your scenes are fantastic. The backgrounds look real.

Max,

The baskets and misc. items complete the scene beautifully.

Joe,

Your construction of the building with HO parts looks great. The building looks o-scale without a doubt. Very nice job.

Alan Graziano

Thanks, Alan.

Thank you for the input Alan, and the "Like" Max.  It means alot coming from guys with such skill and talent.