Water Colour Diversion

Water colour painting provided a welcome alternative to referendum thoughts on polling day.



Moorland Scene

This is the second day I’ve spent with local artist Celia Olsson experimenting with water colours. My hope is to develop a better colour sense and learn interesting painting techniques.

The palette is much the same as I’ve used with acrylics: ultramarine blue, cerulean blue, burnt umber, burnt sienna, raw sienna, gamboge (new for me) and lemon yellow. But no white and no black.

To The Lighthouse

I wasn’t really happy with the lighthouse: too large in relation to the other buildings and roughly constructed in thin card. So I got to thinking how I could improve it.

I filed up a lighthouse about two-thirds the previous size from a piece of 0.5mm nickel silver, slightly rounded the edges to soften the impression of a 2D cut-out. The buildings either side are also fretted from nickel silver, soldered to the lighthouse at the correct height, and with a leg on which to plant the structure on the model. About 9mm of the lighthouse is visible above the landscape.

By way of experiment, I've also raised the backscene by half an inch to give the impression of standing on higher ground to take the picture. 

Layout Mock-up

After three weeks of iterative improvement since the Missenden Weekend, I’ve more or less taken this one-third of scale mock-up as far as I can go. This is the view over the railway and the Bristol Channel.

       Looking across to Exmoor

I’ve learned a lot on this journey of discovery (that was the objective): the mock-up has been through a dozen or so rounds of “improve-photograph-critique”. Working at such a small scale, it’s been easy to make substantial structural changes along the way in order to reach this stage. However, at this scale, it’s also very difficult to make very accurate scenic elements: the castle and farm buildings are only a few millimetres high. And it’s difficult to photograph. At the scale distance I want the eventual layout to be viewed, this is as much of the layout as I can get into the frame.

All of which suggests the next model should be at full scale. Whether that’s another mock-up or the final layout I don’t yet know.



Pre-mock-up Mock-up

I’ve almost made a mock-up.

Under the guidance of Paul Bambrick at the Spring Railway Modellers Weekend at Missenden Abbey, I've taken my first steps towards making the St Donats layout. There’s lots to do, but I’ve now got something to look at, and here’s the first pic with “improvement notes” to guide the next steps.

The one-third scale mock-up is 9” deep and 12” wide. The “View Box” refers to the enclosing box with a cut-out to frame the view, which will eventually be seen in a theatre-type presentation with wings and a proscenium arch. The new frame height will be about 4.5” at mock-up scale.



A break from the day job

I’ve taken out a couple of days to get this blog going, and to explore ideas for the layout. I used Generate a Panorama (see Reference Sites) to try out various viewpoints as the basis for a backscene.


Trial "Panorama" for St Donats

The signpost on the left shows the position of St Donats castle in the foreground on the Welsh side of the Bristol Channel, while the right signpost shows the summit of Selworthy Beacon on the hill overlooking the sea between Minehead and Porlock Weir.

I’m not sure whether to separate the foreground, up to the sea, from the background, or whether to model the whole layout as a single, continuous unit. The model height of the background, or backscene as it will become, will depend on the viewing height of the model.