Gibbon, Cozad & Western - "The 100th Meridian Line"

[C855B]

You guys make a good point. I will ask my brother-in-law about this. He is a professional photographer/artist who has a large-format printer for his work, which [...gulp...] fetches four figures at big-city galleries. From past conversations I surmise, however, that even at the lowest resolutions his particular printer is beastly expensive just for the consumables, and he may have qualms about tearing it up for 150' of output.

Yesterday I was searching around for "sky backdrops" and found some almost products. The most promising (I thought) was 4'x50' rolls of "party backdrops", but they had nothing without a foreground. Pure sky backdrops were available from stagecraft vendors, at Hollywood stagecraft prices, with the best ones rental only.

I did find http://railroadbackdrops.com. At the prices quoted it's unaffordable, which might also be a reflection of what I know from b-i-l.

Further thought... billboard printers may not be the way to go. The process dots are too large for in-room viewing. I might talk to a "vehicle wrap" company, although their pricing is outrageous, too, and will probably want even more to do a medium they normally don't work with.

EDIT II: Pricing from megaprints.com put a "wall mural" around $4000 for the perimeter treatment I need. More than once I've heard the quip about inkjet ink, per ounce, being the most precious and costly substance on the planet. I'm going to work on the paint idea for a while.

[Cajonpassfan]

Mike, have you tried LARC Products? I just met Bill Brown, the owner, at KC NMRA and tried his printing process with my artwork and I'm impressed. He sells a number of backdrops, but will do a custom print from your images. He prints on a 7 mil vinyl-like material called Fab-Tex. It's surprisingly tough, has a flat finish, is waterproof, and self adhesive. You peel the backing off and have a repositionable tough film that won't run...I like the product a lot. It runs about $9 a square foot, but I only print the landforms and cut out the skies and then place the print over a painted sky backdrop. In N scale, most landforms are not that tall, so a square foot goes a long way. The backdrop need not be a continuous piece (the image does); sections can be spliced with nary a seam visible. Check it out...
Otto K.

[pdx1955]

While you could spend $$$$ on backdrops, I'm in the camp that believes that you can do an excellent job with just paint. You have an advantage that most of us do not - an artist spouse. I would think between yourselves, you could come up with a blended sky backdrop that looks good. It goes relatively fast and the paints all play nice with each other. Once you got the sky, you just need to create the illusion of distant buttes, hills, etc - a few layers of paint will cover that. The mind will fill in the rest of the details as you are focusing on the foreground anyway. You only need that where you are modeling flatter areas because where the foreground scenery is is dominant - hills, bluffs, etc, you just won't see the background hills as it's blotted out.

[Mike C]

OHHH very nice

[C855B]

This weekend's progress...

First cove, two more to go:

   

Test sky behind test mountain:



That is the "basis" color alone on a foam panel. I might (or might not) have a chance this evening to test the shading and fades, but I like the results so far.

[Santa Fe Guy]

I prefer to paint my own backdrops to suit my scenery and its position on the layout.
You can blend the backdrop colour to the background colour of the scenery.
Here is one I did on a friends HOn3 layout just recently.
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It does not need to be too detailed and should only use about 3 to 4 colours of cheap acrylic paints.
I will do my own new HOn3 layout when I get sorted in my mind what and where it is to be.
Rod.

[C855B]

Latest sky test:



Getting close to what I'm after. The streaking was not quite as intended since I was still adjusting air levels on the gun for the fades, but the general technique seems to work. I think the end game will be "five" colors, using intermediates blended from the three used in this test. Getting a start/stop technique down is the last hurdle. It goes fast, so once I finish the corner coving I can clear everything off the layout and get this done. You can see the first corner is complete and blended into the walls.

I wanted to post this earlier this week, but discovered that the iPhone camera won't work with that much "sky". Without a 3rd-party app, it has no ability to manually set white balance, and with that much blue in the background the auto white balance turned everything a murky yellow. Had to get the real camera out and remember to take it to the studio.

[Specter3]

Mike

It’s always amuzing when we stumble into one of the downsides of using our phones as cameras. We have gotten used to being able to take pictures that turn out decently for the most part with them.  When we find one of those times where they just don’t work well ya got to remember it is a phone... Keep on working. It’s looking really good.

[James Costello]

I see these and can't help but think of this thread lol:

http://www.railpictures.net/photo/669140/

[C855B]

But... but... but... I don't think I've posted a pix with Centennials... yet.   However, you are absolutely right in their being key in the layout theme.

Given the time of day and location, that picture has to be of the SuperVAN, UP's competitor to Santa Fe's Super C. The 40Xs were ten years old and getting pretty tired, each having over a million miles at that point. That was also close to the end of the SuperVAN as its business was fading. With only two on the point the train must have been small, in that time frame it would have normally been a Fast Forty Sandwich - DDA40X, 8000-series high-geared SD40-2, DDA40X. When the service first started - 1970? - this train would have four of these monsters for something like 10-12 HP per ton. Witnessing these at speed through the superelevated double reverse curves at Pomona was jaw-dropping.

UP was giving Santa Fe a run for their money, but Chicago to L.A. via North Platte added enough miles versus Santa Fe's straight shot that all the high-geared power in the world wasn't going to make a dent against the Super C's record times.

[Cajonpassfan]

The photo caption says January 25, 1979, so they'd be really old. 
The location noted is wrong, it's not Sullivan's curve (that's up the line behind the photographer). The train is westbound on the original line, about to enter Cajon. Nice photo though!
Otto K.

[jagged ben]

The photo caption says January 25, 1979, so they'd be really old.
...

Ten years old is really old?

[Cajonpassfan]

I know, right? I forgot to add a smiley face. There I fixed it.
Some of Santa Fe's 1905 era 2-10-2's lasted into the mid fifties...
Otto

[C855B]

Hmmm... yeah, the specified location is sort of off, but the comments more or less confirm Sullivan's is behind the photographer. Close enough, though I would call the location "Cajon", as well. Wiled-away far too much of my youth hanging around Cajon siding and Blue Cut, back before neither the RR nor BLM would hassle you about being there. SoCal used to be a cool place to live, recent visits allege otherwise.

Ten years old is really old?

For UP power at the time, yes. They'd run the snot out of everything. Like I said, the Centennials had well over a million miles apiece on them and were on the verge of being mothballed at Yermo when that photo was taken, and were off the roster three years later (although the MP takeover had a lot to do with that).

[C855B]

The sky's the limit! Or more accurately, the sky is limiting progress at the moment.

First, the fun stuff. You guys know I've been playing a lot with: 1) lighting, and 2) UV-luminescent paints for night skies, and some ground effects such as switchstands and lighted structures. These projects have converged. I was doing more research on the Wildfire pro UV paints and finally ran across somebody's site advising against using LED UV lighting with Wildfire, it's the wrong wavelength and the results will be poor. I can attest that, yes, the results were disappointing. The full story is Wildfire and other UV-sensitive paints require a 365nm light source, while the LED sources being sold by the stage lighting companies are 390-400nm. UV "blacklight" tubes and other more traditional UV sources were recommended.

It's always a bad idea to tell me I can't do something.    365nm LEDs exist, I know that because it is also the working wavelength for UV-cured resins, and super-bright 365nm LEDs are used in dental resin curing wands (Shapeways users also might want to take note). They're just very expensive, at least from US sources. eBay to the rescue, as usual. A Chinese vendor is selling UV spotlights in several wavelengths in the popular track-lighting formats - regular screw base, MR16 and GU10. GU10 is what I'm using for daylight spots, so there you go. I ordered a couple of 365nm samples which arrived over the weekend. My biggest concern was the vendor fudging whether they really were the stated wavelength.

Normal room ambient, no UV:



Ambient at normal, UV on:



OK, this is promising. I've never seen the UV "pop" with the room lights on.

Lights out, UV on:



Oh, my. Quite telling the result is good enough to be photographed. (And I'll ignore Robyn's admonitions about "blob" stars for the time being. We've discussed that.) A bulk order for the new bulbs will be forthcoming, all I have to do is add heads to the existing tracks and we're all set.

On the other, slightly less fun sky fronts, the corner coving project has been a pain in the neck... and shoulders, and back. I am now taking the lumps you guys warned me about, I needed to get the sky thing resolved before getting too far along with benchwork. I had intentionally made the corners long reach areas since they were to be scenery only without operation, so only needed minimal access. So add 48" of height to a corner already 30" deep, and there you have it. I had to build this monstrosity so I could walk on the benchwork over running track to finish this corner:



(I hear the chorus, "WE TOLD YOU SO!" Yeah, yeah, yeah.    )

Still working on spray technique for the sky, where painting is going to have it's own reach headaches. While the test result (the sky in the first pic on this post) is to me very satisfying, as previously mentioned it was more streaky than I wanted, and that was from an uneven spray gun pattern. I spent a good part of the weekend trying to get four - count 'em - four guns of various inexpensive D-I-Y-store types to spray latex evenly enough for fades, only to end in frustration. What I did determine, thankfully, it would take a double-action gun to solve the start-stop problem I was worried about. So a new Paasche gun with an assortment of tip sizes should be on my porch in a day or two. Optimistic!