Saturday, May 17, 2014

Work Session Report - May 17, 2014

Bernie stopped by after his golf lesson and round to patch the gap in the backdrop. While he was here he also tweaked some other sections on the backdrop between Randolph and Waterbury. One neat thing he did was blend a barn and farmhouse photo into the painted backdrop. 
Finally, we played around with some static grass before he left. Once he left I got out my static grass machine and worked a little on getting a pasture around the hay barn on the peninsula. All in all, a productive day. 
See the photos captions for more details. 

When we altered the peninsula last January we sliced right through the backdrop Bernie had painted. Here's what it looked like before the Masonite was installed. For several months this has been a sky blue patch in a backdrop painting.
Bernie got to work blending the new backdrop section into the one he'd previously painted. He didn't want to be photographed today - he was feeling shy….You can see the sky blue section on the bottom that denotes where the backdrop "splice" joined the old backdrop painting. This went pretty quickly. I think it took him longer to drive out to our place from the golf course than it took to paint the new backdrop! 
The finished section is seamless - Well done! There would be no way I could have matched his colors, or frankly his painting ability. A shallow-relief structure will be installed between the track and the backdrop.  
Closer to Randolph we added a barn and farmhouse from a photography to the painted backdrop. I think this is from a photo George Dutka sent me a while back. There was a pine tree in the photo obscuring the barn - so Bernie blended some additional painted pines to match the picture. We used Bernie's static grass machine for the grass in this section. 


Once Bernie headed for home, I got out my static grass machine and started to dress up the grass in the pasture and along the right-of-way just north of Waterbury. 

Christine dared me to put this on the blog….

3 comments:

Tore Hjellset said...

Excellent update on our national day! I like that last photo :)

Shannon Crabtree said...

Looking good Marty!

Bernie said...

It was fun and only took an hour to get there from Tysons Corner! We will see if the curse continues. It seems like every guest backdrop I paint dooms the layout.

As to being shy, you should be thankful Marty kept my ugly mug off camera. My dermatologist decided to customize my face with some liquid nitrogen to get rid of sun damage. All can say is, "use sunblock!"