I have several Christmas village buildings and props that I put up each year on my fireplace mantel around Christmas.  This year I decided to make streets and a backdrop for it.  The streets and backdrop are ink-jet printed on thick photo paper.  The backdrop was also glued to foam-core board.

Over the years I’ve accumulated quite a large collection of textures for use in 3D modelling on the computer.  So I had some nice cobblestone, flagstone, grass, and snow textures on hand, as well as photographs of street details like victorian-era manhole covers and street drains. I used the flagstones plus drop-shadows to depict the curbs.  I masked the snow layer with a grunge texture to allow some of the grass to show through and used a textured eraser to remove snow from key areas of the street.  The picture to the right shows one of the streets I made.

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