Backscenes at Hewish Gates

I'm a late-comer to the current practice of many who now create backscenes from photographs. In the old days I had a go at painting backscenes or using Peco art backscenes - was not too impressed, so I reverted to just sky blue paint. Nothing could have prepared me for the amazing effect of using photographs of the real location. They add atmosphere and depth to the model on a scale I did not expect.

I created a panorama of stitched photos in Photoshop. Not all the scene is from one contiguous location. The landscape is varied enough that different areas can be stitched together to blend with the foreground model landscape.

The sky was cut out of the panorama and replaced with a sky blue layer, only because I felt the cloud formations would be a distraction from the model. Brightness and Saturation levels were adjusted negatively to produce toned down colours representative of the distant landscape. The scene was then cut into A4 chunks and printed. Each A4 is stuck to the next with double sided tape and this is stuck to the backboard.