I think one of the essential elements of any layout is the background. Gosh, there are thousands of ways to pull this off and each as personal as the next. I've seen everything from solid Teal to stuff that would make Bob Ross weep. I can build most anything in just about any format or media, but drawing and painting landscapes is not my strong suit. I've had a vision of what I wanted to do for years, but never really could figure out how to execute it. While researching images for Eucalyptus trees (another holy grail for Socal modelers) I came across a number of oil and water color paintings that had the look I was after. I wanted my background to be more artistic than realistic and I wanted it to be slightly hazy and out of focus. Well, I downloaded a few images and pieced together a landscape in Photoshop, tiled it and was able to print out sheets of background 100" long on paper. I wanted a hazy effect with the sky and mountains in the background muted and I think I got what I was looking for. This shot was done with a simple print out on and 11x18 sheet of paper to check using photos if this was going to work. I like the effect a lot.
Next to it is a hand painting by my great friend Bruce Petty that is done just like his on the Burbank layout at his home. He's going to paint a series of boards that I will be using on my portable show layout with the effect of looking like a painting on a citrus box. Two styles for two different situations.
