Most of my railroad time this week was spent on painting the clouds. Like everything else, I got better at this as I went along, and so, I kind of did it about one and a half times. I roughed the clouds in on Sunday with some plain white paint, and they looked pretty flat […]

Tonight I painted a base layer for the clouds. They’re definitely going to take a second layer before the white covers over that hideous not-quite-gradient of blue that I put up there. As this is only the base layer, I didn’t bother with any shadows, and so, the clouds have no form yet. So, it […]

Can you believe that I was so cocky as to claim that I thought I knew what I was doing when it came to painting a gradient on the sky? Yeah, me neither. Tonight I painted the second coat. It only really needed it because there were some thin areas up near the corners, and […]

It looks like the sky is going to want two coats, which is good because by the time I got to the bottom, my technique had become much better. My basic blue is “Utah Sky” (2065-40) from Benjamin Moore, but there is very little of the straight colour up there. As others have proposed before […]

This morning, before leaving for work, I sanded the second layer of drywall mud on the backdrop. It’s looking pretty good now, but I’m sure glad I hired someone to do the drywall on the rest of the basement (Amazon Contracting were excellent by the way; if you need drywall in Vancouver, look them up […]

Tonight Andrew and I managed to get the next two pieces of backdrop up. The curve on the right is a 3′ radius, and was much easier to accomplish with the quarter inch Masonite. As with the sharper curve at the other end, we made a couple of plywood formers to support the curve. The […]

Andrew came over for the first time in a while this evening and we made a start on the backdrop. What a battle! Of course it doesn’t help that I’m super-cheap, and so I’m using hardboard that I salvaged from the original basement walls. It is nominally 1/4 inch, but it’s about fifty years old, […]