Yup, Brown! Ok admittedly brown isn’t often the ‘go to’ colour for inspiration, but today, it is.

This past week I’ve been in mid Wales, an area of the UK often overlooked in terms of landscapes the island has to offer. The 2018 summer has been exceptionally dry too, this underlined by the very low levels in the Welsh reservoirs, with areas that have been underwater for decades being uncovered by the receding waters.

The last time this bridge was seen was approximately forty years ago!

So, lots and lots of ‘brown’ then. One thing that is so often seen on layouts is brown trees, we’re taught that as kids almost, paint a tree, the trunk is brown, it’s wood, all wood is brown, and leaves are green, so the stereotype colours of trees is imprinted at an early age. Shelfie2 has taken a bit of a sabbatical over the past month or so with attention being diverted to three real trees, the removal of them that is…

With those out of the way thoughts turned to the woodlands which will form Shelfie2’s background.

One thing the natural light shows here is the colour cast is too cool, too much grey (the trees) providing an improper colour balance. Spending last week amongst the hills of central Wales subconsciously drew that to my attention. Just spending time looking at the layout yesterday and today was flagging the change needed. One way to add warmth to a scene is to add from the red and orange spectrum, so I pulled the loose fitted trees from the layout and gave them a very diluted wash of acrylic burnt umber. As they dried I wondered if I’d done the right thing, the colour was quite vivid and very much in the red! However they have now dried to a very pleasing grey/brown natural colour which will lift the overall colours of the layout.

The only trouble is these, which are already fixed, doh! In can see some more felling taking place now, who’d have thought brown could be so interesting?