Al, this really so great stuff mate, can almost see Don Breckon painting at the trackside, your work very much reminds me of his paintings. Keep em coming!

Very much so and so easy to replicate with the available Monty's casting.Excellent work Al.

Lovely stuff, as usual, Al.

But Monsieur, you are spoiling us viz zeese lovely shots of French locomoteeves....! ;-)

The Breckon mentions are interesting as I'm a particular fan of his work, although I hadn't thought of the connection before. I like the way he places the train in the lanscape, present but not dominating the scene. Reading some of his books, it's interesting to see his thought processes regarding the composition of a picture, where he might move something around or take something out before the whole thing looks right, but often it's not obvious what needs to be done. I find the same thing with scenic modelling - sometimes you know an area of the layout isn't quite balanced or working the way you want it, but it's often not clear what needs to be done, until inspiration arrives! I found that adding that enclosure to the base of the tree made a surprising different to the whole look of the module on that side, as it not only made the tree look as if it had been there for a while, rather than just being plonked into place, but it provided a point of visual interest in the foreground where previousy there had only been grass and so on.

CK - much more to come, I'm afraid!

Lovely attention to detail Al , all looks like it should in the real world .

 Now when you have a few minutes to spare you are most welcome to

weave some of your magic on our layout . Coffe and a biscuit will be provided .  ;-)

Hi Al, what a post - each one of those photos shows a whole little world of itself. It's a bit like a landscape outside a train window, actually. Superb. I know what you mean about composing a scene for a painting, it has a lot in common with layout building, I think.

I look forward to seeing some French landscapes from your hand!

Thanks all - great fun to be able to share our modelling on a forum like this, isn't it?

Mike: coffee and biscuit (*a* biscuit?) sounds very tempting, and of course I'd love to see the layout!

Mikkel - thanks! Actually the French hint is a bit of a tease, it'll be a while before anything develops in that direction but it is very much a long term ambition.

Hi Al, excellent scenics. Fave shot is the horses - very realistic. Keep the pics coming.

Mike

Via Ray (Yard Shunter) of this forum, I found out about a very good CD of ambient bird song called "Dawn Chorus". It's great to set it playing at a very low level, just loud enough to be "there" but not obtrusive. If you know your birds then some of the sounds on it will be a bit out of place for daytime running, but other than that it's brilliant, as there is no narration.

This is the CD:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Dawn-Chorus-Birdsong/dp/B00028DPLG/ref=sr_1_sc_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1376342398&sr=8-1-spell&keywords=dawn+choris