Perceiving is Believing
Hello,
Happy Friday.
I hope your day is going well?
I’ve got some stuff to show you. But first let’s take a break-- close your eyes. Take a few deep breaths and let whatever is swirling around in your head dissipate.
Relax.
I’m going to show you some pictures. Try not to look at them directly, rather just look past them and experience them peripherally. See if you can let yourself go and be immersed in them without trying to focus specifically on them.
Okay, ready…?
This is part of the Saint Anne Street subway station on my layout. It’s one of the first scenes I built as I re-started my model railroading career. It was almost entirely “drawn from memory,” in this case memories of my childhood growing up outside of New York City. Somehow, the strongest image I had was of the tile walls of the subway station, and how they all had a yellowed, off-white appearance.
As I developed techniques for casting hydrocal and forming my castings into the curves and other shapes I needed, I began to look at the reflective properties of my models. When we look at a surface, we see the light which bounces off of it. The quality of that light is affected by the qualities of the surface. In the picture, there is a round corner on the shiny tile wall where the light comes off almost mirror-like, what’s called a specular reflection. That’s a fundamental quality of glossy surfaces. Looking at the subway platform, on the other hand, you see no bright points at all, because the surface is rough and the light is reflected unevenly. One of my favorite things about modeling with Hydrocal is its reflectivity. If you stain it, or even paint it with flat spray primer as I’ve done here, the surface looks to the eye much more like concrete or stone, because it has similar reflective properties. Using a gloss spray on the Hydrocal walls, though, I achieved the tile-like reflections that I wanted.
If, on the other hand, I’d used styrene for the platform, I would never have gotten the reflectivity right.
**How many of you really work at seeing what’s around you? Perceiving the complex shadings and colorations of the objects in your environment and their textures? What tricks and tips have you found or developed to include those aspects into your modeling?**I learned a long time ago to take a camera with me if I want to model something or some place. I also refer to sites like Flickr or Google Images. Not only do I wish to capture detail, but also, as you point out, the shading, colorations and textures. It makes a huge difference in the overall realism of a scene.When you’re looking at your layout, or somebody else’s layout, how much would you say you notice (or don’t notice) when the subtleties of color and texture are left out, or under-modeled? I notice the subtleties because I was made aware of them long ago by my wife who is a professional artist and has coached me for years. For example, my grass was always too green. Adding yellow and brown highlights made a real difference. The same is true of other vegetation.Does it bother you to look at a scene that’s not fully-developed with respect to color and texture?
2 things that almost always “bug” me about Model railroads are I think related to color and texture. #1 bad or inappropriate lighting. This is doubly true in photography compared to real life and it’s not just a matter of not enough light bulbs, but the color temperature and shadow behavior that is bothersome. my eye detects that the lighting is too yellow or too green and that the shadows aren’t right and it distracts from the scene #2 Difference in precision of the trains versus the scenery. a superdetailed engine and cars running through a scene with a treeline consisting of Woodland Scenics foliage is often too much of a mismatch. It works if you’re dealing with more of a peripheral look when you don’t focus on the train in the scene, but if a well detailed model draws in your focus, the more abstract trees and groundcover become more obvious. Of course, this topic isn’t just about potential negatives. I’m currently contemplating a distinct lack of good lighting and good trees on a club layout for a club I’m thinking of joining, so it comes to mind.
I have been thinking more and more lately that in order to get a good “real world” appearance, at least on a lot of things, you can’t just stop at paint-- you have to go an extra step and add “grit”-- the stuff that wafts through the air and settles down on pretty much everything that wasn’t just washed 5 minutes ago.
Thanks for the reply and comments!
John
This is often a problem I see with modeled Engines and rolling stock, particularly diesels. People wield a can of Dullcoat with no light touch. Diesel paint jobs are glossy or at least semi-gloss. As they get dirty, that glossyness is dulled, but it doesn’t go away. They reflect light as glossy objects. That is until they are completely filthy or the paint job is peeling such as your Typical SP unit. Too often I see models that have been dullcoated and no longer look real, because they don’t reflect light the way a real loco would.
Hi Timm–
Thanks for the comments!
My wife gets annoyed at me for stopping and looking at every little thing. I take pictures of everything from all angles and all types of weather. I am fascinated by lights and shadows and the interplay between color and textures. I’m probably more intrigued about colors and textures than I am about details. I also spend hours combing google looking for good pictures that exemplify the subtlties in shading and texture.
John
Interesting that the first few are Hopper. Way back in the 80’s, John Armstrong wrote an article on incorporating elements of art on the model railroad, his example being Hopper’s Nighthawks, which he replicated as a 3D model on part of his layout. I think Armstrong hit on the very idea that these works rely strongly on color and not so much on detail, which makes them ideal for model railroad use.
–Randy
Exactly why weathering is so effective. This clean locomotive
looks nowhere near as good as this one with only light weathering using powders:
I like to use washes of cheap acrylic paint. They come out flat, rather than glossy, and by using washes I get natural variation in the amount of pigment deposited across the surface. Like reflectivity, non-uniform surfaces add to the realism of most things which have been outside for a while.
Heh, yup. I even had that one queued-up to include but decided not to at the last minute. Figured it might move the discussion in the wrong direction. So I focused on ones that were more landscap-ish in nature. Here’s another one of the Hopper’s I selected but edited because it was getting too heavy with photos…
On the other hand, it might have been a better selection as its at least railroad-oriented. [:)]
But my goal was to make a point about color and texture-- and also perhaps how nice it would be if I could have gotten Edward Hopper to do the backdrops for my layout… [:P]
John
Oh definitely-- very much agreed. And it comes down everywhere, on everything. And even if it doesn’t make something “dirty”, it at least makes it “gritty” and gives it a texture. And so often it just stands out, to my eye at least, when its not there. And I really don’t mean “weathering” per se, although it certainly is an aspect of weathering-- but not one that perhaps many people consider, apart from the dirt.
John
I like the grittiness description. And I also like the fact that in the 2 pictures, the reflectivity of the areas not covered isn’t lost AND there is a varying degree of reflectivity based on the grit. Again, too much weathering seems to start with a shot of dullcoat which really ruins the entire look. Only the heavily weathered areas are dull.
The subtleties of color variation have always escaped me because I’m partially colorblind, particularly in the green & brown hues. So my ground cover and tree foliage typically come from a package that has the word “green” on it - otherwise I’m just as apt to model a scene to look like dead grass and dead trees. So my ground cover and rock castings are probably on the bland side for most viewers. The upside is that it looks planty fine to me, because I just don’t know any better! [^]
I’m not really sure how one defines the word “texture.” Lighting and context are certainly high on my things-noticed list, though. Take my rolling stock, for example. It’s over 90% Blue Box, which provides a reasonable level of believability (not overly toy-like in appearance), and is pretty consistent between car types. But throw a more highly-detailed car into a train and take a photo of it - suddenly details on everything else look crude and oversized and the overall illusion is lost. Case in point: I acquired a used RS11 and set it out amongst my other locos, but it just didn’t seem to fit and I couldn’t put my finger on the reason why. Then it suddenly dawned on me - it had been fitted with m.u. hoses, which none of my other locos have!
In like manner, I like to achieve a good yet affordable level of detail with my trees and scenery. While I’ve stepped up from the Woodland Scenics bag-o-trees, I don’t have forests of Supertrees either. Polyfiber/ground foam trees are the norm and seem compatable with my rolling stock detail level. While nobody will ever confuse my layout with reality, there remains a consistent plausibility about it.
Lighting is a biggie to me when it comes to photograhing models. Most shots you see are very well lit. But I’m always asking, “Where is the sun here?” There is no dominant light direction to cast a shadow, something so basic to anything we see outdoors that we forget to account for it in our
Texture is the surface irregularities of an item. Whether its smooth or rough or raised dots or whatever. When you run your fingers over it, how does it feel? Or if you see it, how does it look like it would feel? If there is light shining on it, particularly from an oblique angle, such that it causes highlights or shadows based on the surface irregularities. Which, in turn, can also affect the subtleties of color of an object. In fact, from a visual perspective, it is completely possible to give an object the illusion of texture (and thus detail) purely through the appropriate application of color-- hues and variations that suggest light and/or shadows.
The French call it “Trompe l’oeil”, which is the art of “Fooling the Eye”. And they also have another similar concept which is more familiar, “Camoflage”, which is likewise the art of fooling the eye. The former is the notion of making you think something is there that isn’t. While the latter is the art of making something that’s there seem not to be. Both concepts utilize subtleties of color and texture-- or the illusion of it-- to achieve their desired effect, which is of course to fool the observer.
John
In my everyday life I can’t say I “work” at seeing what’s around me, because I’m usually driving and need to keep my eyes on the road.[swg] However, I do make use of color and texture in some of my scenes to counterbalance a lack of minute details. Since I’m broke from paying my kids’ school tuitions, I need to do whatever I can to make a mrr scene look believable (i.e. not toylike) without spending a fortune on Woodland Scenics and similar stuff.
On my layout, you bet! I’m always painfully reminded that my work will never rise to the level of George Sellios or even some of the uber-talented members of this forum. Other peoples’ layouts, nah…only if somebody over-promotes a layout and I spend a lot of time traveliing to visit it, then I might feel somewhat let-down.
OK Here’s an example of how I used not only light, but darkness, to create a more believable-looking scene. This photo below shows my rendition of a steelmaking device called a basic oxygen furnace (BOF). It’s like a giant cookie jar-shaped vessel that fiery hot iron gets poured into, and has [almost] pure oxygen blown onto it. The enclosure itself consists of two Walthers Electric Furnace buildings. I painted the interior walls and ceiling black to create the illusion of
I’m sticking my neck out here but in my opinion clouds painted on backdrops are perhaps* the quickest giveaways that a great photo of a great layout is of a model. And the more like a cloud the painting looks, the more obvious its status as a model becomes. Go figure.
Dave Nelson
I was wondering if I had anything with any color or texture worth a doggone. I get concerned with mass.
I looked through some of my shots and was surprised at the ones whose color and texture I liked. Some are just junky.
That’s a great picture!
How long did it take you to build that scene?
I know what you’re saying. Its not something you can easily put your finger on, but its something like the more they look like realistic clouds, the less real the overall layout looks sometimes.
Perhaps its because some parts of the scene is very realistic while others are not up to the same standard, and the difference between the two is great enough that your eye / brain perceives the difference and can’t accept it as ‘real’.
John
I like the brickwork in the first photo. And I like the rusty roof in the third photo. I also like the overall composition in the restaurant scene.
John
