San Lorenzo Mini Layout | Finishing Track, Scenic & Backdrop Painting!

[Music] Howdy Folks Dave here at Thunder maesa Studio where this week I'm continuing work on the 030 sand Lorenzo mini layout now if you happen to have missed the first few installments in this build series Fe not you can check them out at the link but in a nutshell what I'm doing is repurposing Vern Niners award-winning San Lorenzo diarama into a 2x4 ft mini layout so that I can also run some of his wonderful estrea and Sonora Grande equipment now the key tasks I'd like to accomplish this week are finishing the scenic painting on that foam Rock work we did last time then painting and ballasting the track and then painting and installing a backdrop for this little slice of Mexican border country that's a lot of ground to cover so we better jump right in and get started of course all the that painting might get a little messy so I've gone ahead and removed all of the structures and figures and details basically anything I don't want to get paint on because the first job is going to be to paint the track and for that I'm going to be using my old favorite Rustoleum dark brown camo which does a really nice job of simulating old rusty iron for the rails before I start spraying paint everywhere I want to show you how I prep the turnout first of all I put the the Caboose ground throw in the straight up position which centers the points between the rails and then I've got two little tiny pieces of masking tape which cover uh where those Point rails are going to connect with the stock Rail and to make sure I don't get paint on the walls and everywhere else I've got a couple of pieces of scrap cardboard that I can mask things off with I don't care if I get a little bit of overspray on the scenery I'm GNA be painting all of that real soon of course we want to make sure we're getting coverage on both sides of the rail both sides of the track okay I think that's as good as it's going to get now I'm not going to waste any time waiting for this enamel to dry I'm going to go ahead and start in now on the scenic painting for the rock work and where we left off here was this is just the scenic base coat this is just a coat of some light tan flat enamel paint that I had a special color mixed up and now the next step is I'm going to be going over all of this with a dark wash and a lot of people have asked me what the formula is here if I have a special formula uh no it's basically just you know black paint black acrylic paint and water so there's not a you know a hard and fast formula for this you just mix it to taste you know mix it till it looks right to you the point of this is to get back into the cracks and crev es and darken those up there's two schools of thought when applying this kind of wash one is use a sprayer but since this is a modest size layout this isn't going to take very long I actually prefer to use a big soft paintbrush now if you're doing this at home in your living room or something um I highly advise putting some newspapers down or drop cloth or something you if you want to stay married you can see how it goes on really dark but you know most of this is going to run off down towards the bottom so really we're only getting it back you know into the texture sometimes I'll go over some places a couple of times I think it needs it now all of this is going to take a little while to dry so that makes this an excellent time to get started on the back drop this is a 2x4 ft sheet of 1/8 of an inch thick tempered Masonite hardboard that means it's got one smooth side and it's kind of rough on the back this is what I want to use for the backdrop it's about the same dimensions as the layout itself but as you can see it's a little flimsy so before I start painting it I want to add a frame to the backside and to do that I need to take it home to my workshop there so right now I'm just cutting some one by two stock so I can frame the back of that piece of Masonite I don't want to have to deal with any screw or nail holes coming in from the front so I'm just going to glue and clamp these pieces you might think that's not very strong but you know if you do it properly it is plenty strong in fact this is the same way that I built all of the backdrop panels for the Thunder Mesa layout and I never had any trouble with those sure that's up there flush that edge what do we always say about clamps never have too many now the same same thing on these end pieces except you'll notice these are a little longer and that's so they can connect to the uh 1x3 frame on the layout now the same thing down on this side so to save on weight I'm not going to put anything across the bottom not going to put a uh a piece down there but I am going to have one in the middle here I use these C clamps I always put a piece of cardboard or something to keep from marring the surface got a couple of heavy paint cans keep downward pressure on that now to reinforce those Corners I'm going to cut some 45 degree angle braces out of this quarter inch thick [Applause] MDF and we'll just glue and clamp these in place as well well my hands are just about Frozen and that's about all I can do here anyway so I'm going to leave all this to dry overnight we head back up to the studio and finish the scenic painting on that foam Rock work now I want to start just rendering out these rock formations so I'm going to take our original Scenic base color and then I'm going to mix in a little bit of unbleached titanium just to lighten it up a shade the brush I'm going to be using here this is an artist brush it's called a filbert and so instead of like a flat shape like most paintbrushes have it's kind of rounded on the edges and that means it's not going to give you hard edges when you go to uh paint the scenery like this but I'm not trying to get you know coverage on it I'm just trying to hit the uh the tops of the textures and so that shadow that we put in with with the uh with the dark wash will show through and this is the step that really starts to bring the scenery to life when you first put the paint on it might look a little Stark and a little uh oversaturated or too bright but as it dried it's it just tones right down usually when you see me going vertical like this I'm I'm applying the paint through the tops of the textures and then I'll go back and do this you know horizontally and that's just kind of blending it in again I'm going back and dry brushing the same color under the ties also you know a dry Dusty Sandy environment like this everything's going to get that color on it now I want to take a little bit of burnt sienna and mix it in with that same color this is just to add a little bit of variety then I can go likely places like this just kind of pull it down just adds a little bit more drama and interest I think we're about ready for the final pass and for that I've mixed a whole bunch more of this unbleached titanium in with the scenic base color and then just kind of go around and hit the tops of everything kind of pull pull everything together and unify it paint your happy little rocks see it's all about creating this contrast you see that down in there that's the darker tone and up on the surface is the lighter tone and that's achieved just by hitting the tops of the texture not trying to get it back in there I think we just about got it here but now I want to go back and do some more dry brushing on the track and for that I'm going to be using the same dirty palette I'm going to mix in a little bit of this um Apple Apple Barrel country gray cuz I want the look of ties that have just bleached and worn in the sun using a piece of cardboard to get most of the paint off my brush see a little bit more of the Earth Tone out here on the main line what the dry brushing has the effect of doing is brings out the texture that's molded into these plastic ties makes them look a lot more like real wood so what I'm doing basically is I'm going back and forth between a warmer tone and a cooler tone gray and a reddish tan that gives a lot of variety and makes it look like old weathered wood I'm going to be doing a little bit more on the track but I want to wait until I get you know some balance on here right now I want to clean the tops of the rails and make sure the train still start by peeling this masking tape off now I use one of my handy wine Corp track cleaners some odorless mineral spirits and I wrap a piece of little t-shirt around here and this should take off both the acrylic paint and that spray enamel underneath by the way you don't want to wait too long to remove that spray enamel from the rail head the longer you wait the harder it's going to be okay what's next okay the glue is dry and the clamps are off and I've got my backdrop panel back up here at the studio and the first thing I want to do with it is add a coat of primer this is the same kills 2 white primer that I used on the studio walls now I'll use my paint roller try to get a nice even coat on here that's probably going to take two coats so we'll let that dry for a few while I wait for that to dry in there I think I'll head on over to my paint store and see if they can match this for me this is a chip of the light blue sky color that I use on the Thunder Mesa backdrop and the Goldfield Calico and I want to use the same color here and that way all of the layouts in the layout room will kind of be unified and tied together with the same color sky all right a couple of hours have gone by I've put the second coat of primer on there and I've got my sky blue all mixed up and ready to go so let's start painting the backdrop once again I'm just using a roller try to get a nice even coat on here I also want to paint the edges to match okay we let this coat dry see where we're at while I wait for that sky blue to dry I'm going to start ballasting the track but you know ballast might be too strong of a word I'm doing this in the the time honored Narrow Gauge tradition of just using plain dirt and this is some some light tan sand that I picked up on my travels can't remember exactly where I got it and I wanted to do it this way because um on Verns a straight our Grande he did something very similar he wanted it to look like the uh you know the track was just laid right in the dirt I like to take a big soft brush and go right down the middle like this and then use a smaller brush to go back and you know carefully arrange it a little bit better this is really a step you want to take your time and not be in a hurry with sometimes I'll go Tie by tie like I'm doing now with a small brush of course you really want to take your time and a lot of care around things like turnouts because ideally you would like them to still be able to operate when you're done like right here where this uh the throw bar for the turnout is with the ground throw is I'm not going to put any sand down in between there I'm just going to build it up around the outside so basically I'll just do like that I'll do one you know pass down the middle and one pass on each side something that's really fine like this sand you do have to do a bit more grooming on it than you would if it was you know big chunks of ballast also a really good idea to make sure there's nothing up between the guard rail and the stock rail I'm just going to keep working my way all the way around until I've got this balast everywhere that I want it and nowh that I don't to glue this in place I'm going to use a solution of diluted white glue and uh since I'm just about out of it I'm going to show you how I make that I use this same bottle just about every time and I've got a mark right here see that it's a little less than a third a little more than a quar of the way up there and I'm going to fill this with white glue right out of the bottle till it comes up to that line right there all right now I'm going to fill this the rest of the way up plain water I'm going put the lid back on and I'm going to shake the heck out of this make sure it's tightly closed now with my glue mixture ready to go I want to get all of this wet so I'm going to spray on a fine mist of wet water and that's you just take a spray bottle like this fill it with water put one or two drops of liquid detergent in there hand soap dish soap doesn't matter and that's just to break the surface tension because if I tried to put the glue directly on here it would cause that light sand to ball up now with that wet take my glue bottle I'll open it just a little bit go right down the middle and having that wet water on there is going to cause that glue to just spread out soak in everywhere that it's wet so usually I go right down the middle and I come back and do the uh the shoulders on either side of the track as well one thing I elected to mention here um to prevent gluing the points in place come back with a small paintbrush like this wipe it off so it's dry and just soak up that excess glue well I should honestly just leave this alone now and let it dry overnight okay I think I've got everything I need ready to go here so it's time for the moment I know a lot of you have been waiting for let's paint that backdrop so let's see I've got my sky color here then we've got our Scenic base color we got some white acrylic then I've got some U raw Sienna some unbleached titanium some black and some green acrylics got my pettes got all my brushes ready to go the first thing I want to do is mix up a lighter shade of blue and I'll show you why so currently we've got a nice un uniform Sky Blue on here the problem with that is that the real Sky doesn't usually look like that it usually gets lighter down towards the horizon because of dust and you know particulates in the atmosphere Haze things like that so we want to simulate that look with some paint so what I'm going to do is mix a lighter shade of the sky blue just by adding a bunch of acrylic white to it I'm just going to do this by eye and these are just inexpensive craft acrylics so what I want to do now is take a big 2in flat brush and this is not a hardware store brush this is an artist brush for applying uh gesso grounds to Canvas it's very soft start down here at the bottom got to work kind of fast because I'm going to be blending this up into the the darker Sky color up above now I got it to about there come back with my full strength sky blue color we're going to blend and feather these together so I'm just going horizontally here doesn't matter if there's a few streaks in there those are just going to look like high clouds it's important to remember that as this dries it's it's going to look ugly it's not going to look like a nice even gradient and that's because you know the the paint is drying at different rates in different places you just have to trust the process back away let it dry completely and then come back and judge what it looks like resist the temptation to come back and Tinker with it while it's still wet in fact while I wait for that to dry I'm going to come over here do a little bit more weathering on the track got my colored chalks and my pan pastels right now I'm just adding some Rust this is a pretty subtle effect but I think it adds a lot I'm going to take some black chalk this is just a piece of sandpaper that I like to use to get the chalk dust off the chalk sticks this is the front of the layout so the trains are going to be parked over here a lot so it would make sense that there would be extra soot and staining here in between the rails and it's going to be lighter over here on the sighing because this isn't used as much another cool detail to add in hi traffic areas like this it's good little pure black and a small brush just put in some oil spots here and there steam engines are dirty grimy drippy machines so now I'll lock all this in with some matte finish as you can see I've turned the whole layout around so I can mount the backdrop paint is dry now f it be easier to do the rest of the painting with it in place on the layout I'm just attaching it with some wood screws here so it'll remain removable if I ever need to take it off before we jump back in with the paint just going to take my pencil and sketch in some landforms here line up with the modeled scenery now with backdrop painting or any kind of you know landscape painting really and that's what we're doing here we're painting a big landscape you always want to start with whatever's farthest away from the viewer and then work your way towards them so we've already painted the blue sky and the thing that's next closest is going to be the clouds if there are any in this sky so remember that lighter blue I mixed up put that some of that on my palette I'm going to mix in some more white and a little just a little hint of black to gray that down and the secret ingredient a little bit of the scenic base color and this is to make sure the colors are unified that everything is Unified and works together thing to remember with painting clouds is that they are three-dimensional shapes they're not just you know puffy cotton balls in the sky they have a bottom sides a top I'm not going to have you know Big Thunder heads here like I had on the Thunder Mesa layout this want some uh just some happy little clouds Drifting by and the brush I'm using this is a small filbert brush ideal for doing Cloud shapes like this I like to think about which way is the wind blowing well I think it's going to be blowing that way so the massive part of the cloud is going to be up on this end and it's going to kind of Trail off there towards the end while that's still wet take some more of this white remembering which way the sun is coming from in this world I like to put it high and to the left are adding some highlights so I'm keeping the the bottom of the cloud dark and just putting white up on the top and that's going to give it that three-dimensional look I was talking about another thing to remember about clouds is that the farther away they are the smaller they're going to appear and the lower down the closer to the Horizon really letting the bre do most of the work here just the shape of it one thing to watch out for when painting clouds is is getting it you know too uniform and even in their spacing like they're all regimented marching across the sky it's going to look a lot more natural if you have you know two or three cluster together and then another one further off when we do backdrops we're doing you know basically middle of the day colors um most of the time you know shouldn't be too oversaturated you never want to have brighter colors in the backdrop really than what you have in the scenery and structures of front everything should be you know kind of muted and uh well faded back in the backround [Music] okay I think we're pretty good on the clouds so the next closest thing is going to be the distant Desert Hills so we need a color for that again I'm going to take some of that lighter Sky color that I mixed up and we're going to mix [Music] in some of the same base color and the rule of thumb is that the further away that any land forms are from you the more of the sky color they're going to have mixed into them so they're going to look more distant you're going to be looking at them through more layers of atmosphere and following my pencil line here just do this paint in some distant Desert [Music] [Music] Hills now I want to take my Scenic base color and I'm going to lighten it and desaturate it just a little bit with that uh distant Hill color I just used so I don't want it to be as saturated as the foreground rocks I want it to be close but not quite that's a good shade and now I can block all these [Music] in now I've mixed in a little black and a little raw Sienna to make a Shadow color all I'm doing here is I'm remembering where the light is coming from high to the left and just using negative space created with these kind of abstract shapes and lines to you know render out these Hills [Music] now I'll make up a liar tone for the highlights by mixing in some of that unbleached titanium this stuff right here one of my favorite senic colors you notice this looks very very close to the highlights that's on the 3D seamer and this is the step where it really comes to life [Music] go back to my distant Cliff color I'm going to mix in just a little bit of green because now it's time to add some desert vegetation to these Hills and I really want a just a really grayed out green I don't want a bright green at all greens are really tricky um it's really easy to get green wrong the trick is to just you know kind of keep it as gray or blue gray as you can get then I'm going to use a small flat brush and just dab on those desert shrubs see what I mean by have gray that is that's that's what you want you don't want anything brighter than that [Music] okay I'm going to call that done for now I think I'll clean the track one more time put the structures back in place we'll see how things look [Music] well I think that's more than enough for this time thank you all so much for watching today and I hope you're subscribed with those notifications turned on so we can see you back here again next time when I add lights sounds and even more details to the little village of San Lorenzo until then you can also follow for free over on patreon that's patreon.com thunder Mesa or on Instagram at thunder. Mesa and check out the resources available at the Thunder Mesa Studio website at Thunder mesa. Studio as always a huge thank you to our patreon members who helped to make these videos possible until next time keep moving forward my friends adios for now [Music]