Whilst waiting for more tree making material to arrive, I’ve turned to a trial of the backscene. I’m using a similar technique to that I used here, Setting the Scene where myself and the late Roy Jackson painted the sky/backscene on Geoff Kent’s ‘Black Lion Crossing’. Roy and I subsequently painted Retford’s backscene too. We did one piece to give it ‘a coat of looking at’, decided it worked, and then thought ‘#### it’, we may as well do the rest now. We did the 60ft or so in a couple of hours, such is the speed of the technique.

This technique is an adaptation of a process my fellow beer test pilot Chris Nevard uses. Using simple masks, effects like the hills above can be added using spray cans and non detailed specific shapes can be quickly represented.

Brew Street http://www.nevard.com

Using a generic light sky blue will throw back a lot of ‘blue’ light onto the layout, so I’m already toning that down with the use of mixes of greys and whites. It might seem a lot of work to do as a test piece, this is 10ft long and 18 inches tall, but this will give me the real impact of the final appearance. It’s quite a quick process, the emulsion and acrylic sprays are fast drying. Whilst I’m confident the blue I’ve chosen is a good base point, until it’s under lighting and ‘joined’ to the existing scenery I won’t really know. As it’s on lining paper I’ll see too how the base coat reacts to being flexed when fitted. Once it’s on I’ll get the right feeling for the colour balance required, and recession needed for the real thing.

Whilst this dries I can get access to the back of the tree line and do some more work with that, which requires a little more structure to be visible, and raise the rear lighting batten to get a better, more diffused down wash.

Are we nearly dry yet?….