Almost Ready!

Painting the backscene, with a slight hitch!

When I was about forty years old and first needed reading glasses, I imagined that deteriorating eyesight would become an increasing difficulty with building scale models, but that has not turned out to be the case. Thirty years on, with spectacles I can see well enough: sometimes working upside down under a layout can be a challenge, and I do need lots of light, but I’m OK. What I had not foreseen was osteoarthritis in my hands. That has become a problem recently, but now a consultant orthopaedic surgeon at Peterborough City Hospital has decided to operate to restore functionality to my thumbs, one at a time. It’s going to be great once they are both done, but … the recovery from the surgery each time takes many weeks, so I am currently living, and modelling, with one arthritic (left) hand and the right one out of service for a while. So painting the backscene is having a little break for the moment!

I had originally thought in terms of a photographic backscene like the one I used on my art deco layout, Burghley Junction, but I soon realised that this would not work with Innsdorf. The mountains were to be distant and shrouded in snow clouds. The only real option was to paint the backscene and try to merge it with the 3D scene in front of it. I had already undercoated the plywood backboards and fixed them in place, so with some white and grey paint I began creating the basic outline of the mountains, and that is as far as I got before travel and then surgery stopped play … but, actually, I am quite happy with it as it is and only hope that when I get back to it I do not spoil what I already have! Difficult one.