Christmas Holiday Experimentation...

[Rasendyll]

For a while I've had an idea flitting about in the back of my mind.  I've been thinking of a 'modular' approach to back scenes for urban layouts.  That is to say, separately drawn building facades and backs (and maybe ends in time) which could be assembled against a suitable sky background/paper to make up a backdrop.  In part, I know that's been done before, but the key to my idea is to prepare the the buildings (using a mixture of hand painting, scanning and computer software) individually allowing customised scenes to be built up, avoiding that old 'familiarity' problem.

 

It would even be possible to alter ate building fronts and backs in several layers to create a rising town scene with an element of low relief about it, and to incorporate a perspective effect by printing successive layers to smaller scale. 

 

Anyway I'm getting ahead of myself as I just have one shop front completed so far, prepared in a relaxing afternoon today.  I'd be interested to have people's reaction to this idea and meanwhile here's the one shopfront that I've finished....more to follow.

 

 

Subsequent edit:-  by way of further illustration, here's a small section of terrace assembled from variations on the shop-of course the idea can be applied to far more varied buildings:

 

[allan downes]

Hi Rasendyll.

 

Yoy could be onto something there but I would have thought for the sake of perspective, that it your were going to tier one row behind another to give a sense of depth, reduce the scale of each subsequent row slightly.

 

I thing that the late John Ahearn mastered this on his historical Madder Valley layout now on permanant lone to the Pendom Museum.

 

Cheers.

Allan.

[allan downes]

Hmmm Rasendyll, after reading through your post again I realize that you already suggested more or less what I suggested above.

 

So please feel free to tell me to go to hell - Robinson  does all the time - so why not you !

 

Cheers.

Allan.

[PJBambrick]

Hi Rasendyll

 

Go for it!  Detail the front buildings, then ease back the level of work gradually as the layers recede.

 

Gently fold the building walls for a semi relief effect, fold the roofs back a bit too & add separate chimneys

 

The more depth you have allowed yourself for progressive layers, the better it works, make as many layers as will go in, and overlap them.

 

The 'distance' layers benefit from a reduction in colour saturation (airbrush in a light grey) 

 

Lots of trial & error, well it is for me anyway!  I compare any progress with some chosen reference images as I go.

 

Looking forward to seeing this, if you're doing 'modules', clip them together & work across any joins. 

 

Cheers..... Paul