Interlocking

The backscene for Brighton Trafalgar has gone through a number of iterations. All of them are based around a set of 5mm plywood boards which are screwed to vertical batons which sit outside the edge of the baseboard modules.

The first iteration of the sky was using aerosol car paint with a matt laquer varnish – unfortunately the translucency of the paint gave a green tinge, and the texture of the underlying plywood was quite evident

While taking photographs from the above angle, I realised that I was unhappy with the view of the garage door/etc. behind the layout, so tried out using a temporary sky-board in this location and immediately felt like it added to the scene during photographs:

To gain a more reasonable tone and smooth surface, I decided to look into ID Backscenes, having used them with a degree of success on my previous unfinished loft layout, but there were major problems with adhesion, bubbling and creasing as can be seen below.

The next/final choice was to paint a much more plain backscene with household emulsion paint – in this case “Cornish Cloud” (#EDF0F5) to represent a hazy cloud bank, and a little spritzing of Hycote Grey Primer to act as shading.

Once the variation of tone was achieved on the boards, I sprayed the bottom third with white primer to lighten it, and sponged on some of the base color around the darker grey patches to create some interesting hard lines, finished off with a very vestigial indication of a skyline using the base Cornish Cloud emulsion mixed with some blue-grey acrylic paint and water