Bakersfield & Ventura Model Railroad

I bought a set of miners on eBay, manufacturer unknown, and finally got around to painting a few of them today. These two are my favorites. They still need some detail work, especially their faces, but I'm pretty happy so far.

I have obsessively spent a rather ridiculous amount of time trying to duplicate the distinctive look of Big Sagebrush, a.k.a. Basin Sagebrush (Artemisia tridentata), which is the dominant plant around much of the Lockwood Valley.  At left is a bush made using the Harold Minkowitz method;  center, my Big Sagebrush. At right is one made the same way  but using brown fur and Scenic Express "Sage" colored foam.  It might pass as Yerba Santa, another common plant in  Lockwood Valley. Harold Mikowitz wrote about using fake fur to make bushes on his Pacific Coast Air Line Railway web site (www.pacificcoastairlinerr.com) and I tried his method. It makes good bushes, resembling dry season California chaparral, and I have made some that way and have a few on the diorama. It didn't look like the specific Big Sagebrush I was looking for, but I took that as a starting point and went from there. The main problem was color: Different sages and sagebrushes can va...

Added dirt and some vegetation today. The dirt is sand from the Lockwood Valley. If this was a working layout I'd be somewhat hesitant to use sand as ground cover, for fear it might find its way into locomotive mechanisms, but this is a mostly passive diorama, so not much of a concern there. The vegetation is Woodland Scenics and other brands of ground foam. I plan to add other plants, including some fake fur grass tufts and sisal twine reeds at the bottom of the slope. The background hills are coming out very blue in all my photos. I installed LED tape lights, which are giving everything a bluish cast that I can adjust for in software, but I can't seem to eliminate in the background. I may try swapping the cool white LEDs for warm white. Update: Now that I look at it, I think the problem is that I got carried away with the black wash on the background hills. They really are more grey than tan. I'm considering whether to repaint with the tan paint, then use a red-brown wash...