Yet another background post

[Anonymous]

I had an idea the other day. Some would say that's rare for me but I disagree. I work at a concert venue over the summer and during a concert last week I watched storm clouds roll in. It started with white puffy clouds and slowley turned to black clouds. I thought this would be a kewl thing to do as a backdrop.

Here's my idea... I model point to point so at one yard I would have blue skys and white clounds. At the other yard would be dark storm threatening clouds. In between I would transistion from clear to stormy. So as you would follow a train around the layout, you would either "outrun" the clouds or go towards the storm. It would also look neat if you modeled a couple of people looking up at the clouds with umbrellas in their hands.

Has anyone seen this done and if you have has it looked as good as it sounds. Or do you think that the concept would be lost on most people and or just not turn out right.
Andrew Miller

[philnrunt]

Andrew- I remember a backround in MR that actually had a tornado way off in the distance. It looked ok, and I'm sure it was a conversation starter.
On my last layout, I tried to make some storm clouds, a few looked right, the others, not so good.My backround was blue styrofoam(sky blue, not much painting) and if I took waterbased white and starting thicker at the bottom and swirling my way up with less and less paint in the brush, the blue showing thru gave the clouds a greyish look.
I've always wanted to model someplace just after the storm has passed. Puddles in the street, around gutters, and maybe some distant thunder sound effects. You would probably have to coat the whole layout in high gloss spray, but it would look neat until it started to gather dust and scratches.

[Anonymous]

I have seen this idea before. Railroad Model Crafstman had an article on how to paint clouds on Backdrops a few years back. I read it while I was living in Bozeman so that would place it somewhere between the August 2001 issue and June 2002. The suprising thing about storm clouds though is that the color gray is not very effective. This is due to the fact that most gray paint has a green pigment in it, and when applied to storm clouds there is something about it that causes the gray to scream "I AM PAINT" rather than looking like condencing evaporated water. The solution presented in the article was to paint a white undercoat for the cloud, then go over it with an overspray of silver having it more concentrated at the bottom of the cloud and getting lighter as you worked up. I reccomend that you find the article and read it for your self becasue it also coveres application techniques that I can not fully remember how to do.

As for the idea that you had in your proposed application of it, It sounds like a great idea. In the old National Geographic Explorer episode "Love those Trains" there is a shot of the "Salad Bowl Express" out running a thunderstom in much the same way you described. I assume that since it was on CNW that it must have been somewhere in Iowa or eastern Illinois.

Thanks for getting the old brain stirred up tongiht.

James