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

[learmoia]

A friend of mine did his room with sky blue and white.. (I think he brushed on the white.. started at the bottom and dry-brushed his way up to do the fade... )  I'll try to get a pic next time I'm up there..

His layout room is 10' ceiling and he has a Valence/Fascia off the ceiling about 2'.. and layout height is 50".. so your only seeing about 4' strip of blue around the room..

Your room - Layout to ceiling of blue may be overwhelming.. (or quite spectacular!).. but that's why I suggested going a bit lighter than you think you need..
(My mom wanted the spare bedroom yellow, and she picked out a pale yellow which looked really nice.. Once it was on the walls, it was super bright and almost overwhelming..

~Ian

[C855B]

Plan is to go up to only 4' above the benchtop, leaving another 5' to the ceiling essentially as a visual continuation of the ceiling. There's also the lighting to consider, and I would lose a lot of color control if that much of the "splash" area was blue.

[tappertrainman]

Here's a couple more for you!

Nice smoggy blue on the left side of the second one...







James

[James Costello]

Just going to leave this here - I've never watched one I haven't loved:

https://www.7ideaproductions.com/shop/index.php?route=product/product&product_id=99

[C855B]

Cool. Thanks. I'll have to add it to the library.

[GaryHinshaw]

Excellent snapshot of a moment in time.  I'm struck by how amazingly far you've come  , and how amazingly far you still have to go .   (But really great to see.)

[lashedup]

For what it's worth I ended up painting mine and did it three times to get it what I'd call "close to right". It is not easy to blend it both seamlessly and evenly. After talking to Mike Danneman about it, one of the tricks is to use a damp 3-4" straight brush to blend two colors. 



You can see a little of the brush strokes in the blends above. Almost looks like rain coming down. I'll have a lot of mountain backgrounds in this section anyway, so some of the imperfections will be hidden anyway.

As for what worked for me after a bit of trial and error...

First I set up a laser level in the middle of the room to guide me on keeping my two color blend line consistent. I used two paint trays with fine nap rollers with each color (darker blue in one and lighter blue in the other). I rolled the dark color above the horizontal laser line and rolled the lighter color below the laser line in roughly 3 foot wide sections. Then I used the damp brush in downward strokes to blend about 10 inches between the color first. Your first stroke down will bring some lighter colored paint up with it, but just go over it again till brush marks disappear as much as possible. Then I go up and blend the darker color above in downward strokes into the blended section I just did. Same again on the bottom. The hardest part is keeping the paint workable while being consistent with the amount of blended area. The other issue is getting each 3 foot section to blend into the next 3 foot section without some stray color variations between the sections.

Airbrushing won't work as it just doesn't flow enough. A commercial sprayer with thinned paint might work well for the size of your application. You can rent them cheaply and give it a shot and see. Otherwise rolling and blending above will work, but just don't expect perfection.

- jamie

[C855B]

Well...

1) I expect perfection.

NOT!

No, no airbrush. My gosh, I want to have this part of it done in my lifetime really soon. I have a couple of HVLP pots, a dual-piston compressor and an airless outfit as well, so spray capacity is not an issue - mess containment is, however. The smaller HVLP gun is likely where I'll end up.

This week's focus has been building the corner coving. A false start with the supports cost a couple of days, but I have a good method down now and should have those carved out tonight. Day off for errands tomorrow and then we start bending sheetrock.

[Mike C]

My question is how do you do the rock face ? Assume its a hot wire thingy ..... , but which one ?  The only ones I find are week and whimpy !

[Santa Fe Guy]

For my corner coving on my now Fallen flag Lost Creek RR On30 RR and my new Monarch Branch D&RG RR I used off cuts of Laminex (underside facing out) on the first layout and 1mm thick styrene for my latest RR. Used 12 inches as a radius and cut out some reverse 12 radius 5 ply to support the corners. Used contact adhesive to set the corners in place. With the latter I have not even needed to blend the ends into the backdrops for being so thin it is hardly noticeable once painted.
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Made it quick and very easy to apply. Had all three done in about 2 hours.
Might be worth a thought.
Rod.

[C855B]

Wow, Rod... your styrene idea makes a lot more sense than my current plan with 1/4" sheetrock, but uses what I've already done. Since our errand-running tomorrow involves going into "the big city", I'll call my usual plastics house and see if they have any 1/16" in stock. Thanks for chiming in!

(Now... what do I do with that sheetrock? )

[mcjaco]

Man, Jamie's post about the backdrop painting brings back memories.  Pretty sure Danneman covered that technique way back on one of the Kalmbach layout tours, if you really need to see him do it.  And when he was a teenager!

[C855B]

We chatted about brush blending technique several pages ago, although then we were talking about decorators' "ombré" technique, blending with horizontal strokes. It's more difficult to do now with modern house paints since they have much less open time given all the new rules about VOCs, but I do have extenders on-hand to mitigate that. I would still like to experiment with air-driven techniques first given the size of the task. That the plan is to blend three or four color bands (versus two) has some chance of saving me from myself; the biggest challenge I foresee is not the blending, but managing stops/starts... and not sneezing during a long spritz.

[Ed Kapuscinski]

It's 2018. Screw painting that. Just have someone print it out on a large format printer.

I mean, I'm sure there's someone who makes billboards near you.

[MVW]

Ed's got a point. It's been probably 6-8 years since I last booked a billboard, but IIRC printing costs were only a couple hundred bucks per board. Of course, they'd probably want to mark you up a bit, since their profit from leasing a board isn't built into the transaction. I do not recall what resolution was used. But from a cost/quality/efficiency standpoint, it would seem to be worth checking out.

Jim