‘Scuse Me While I Paint the Sky

I try to do things in order. I really do. As you’ll see I’m not always successful.

Before you start to build benchwork, it probably makes sense to paint your backdrop.You don’t have to do it that way, of course, but it sure is easier to paint a wall with no layout in the way.

In the GM/Penn Mary area I’ve been working on, I’m using the wall for my backdrop/sky. In the past I’ve used a solid blue color on my backdrop. But if you look at the (real) sky, you’ll notice that it gradually gets lighter as it approaches the horizon, sometimes looking almost white the closer it gets to “the bottom.” At least on a sunny day.

In the photos to the right, you can see that there’s already a blue layer—I originally forgot that I intended to do this and painted the walls before the carpet went in. Then remembered post-carpet that I wanted the fading effect. (As much as I try, I often forget to do things in the right order, I’m working on it.) I’ve also put down drop-cloths to protect the carpet.

At the 2017 Fine Scale Model Expo, Dave Myers (sometimes referred to as “The Gatorfoam Guy”) held a clinic on painting a sky backdrop to get that effect. In painting it’s called an “ombre.” And it’s not that hard to do. I did it by myself, but it’s probably easier with a helper. I followed his steps in this area and was reasonably satisfied with the results, although in the picture below, it’s actually kind of hard to see the color change.

I blame that on my paint mixing rather than Dave’s method.

Dave talks about using a brush to stipple the colors together, and this worked for me… mostly. It wasn’t bad on these first walls, but when I moved on to the section around corner where Consolidated Coal will be (track plan here), I found that when the paint dried there were too many brush marks to be convincing. So I went looking for alternatives, and found a good video on the HGTV site. In the video, the host, Laurie March, talks about using actual brush strokes and painting in alternating diagonal motions. I got what I felt to be much better results this way.

You can see this in the photos below. In them, the blended sky is on the left, and on the right are the dark and light colors that were eventually blended. (The first photo is unmodified as it came from the camera. The second is with the blues enhanced so you can see the ombre effect and some of the brush strokes.)