Scenery Thread #7 Backdrops

[tom mann]

Nice tile work Erik.

[chuck geiger]

Ed nice loop - Layout is rockin' - Don't use rubber cement, use dilluted white glue.

[ednadolski]

I bet they'd look even better at N scale eye level. Got any pics from that perspective?

This is closer to eye level (esp. if you are standing on the hill by Tunnel 10  )   Sorry, it is a rather poor quality pic, and it shows some of the seams that were not as well done as others.

One other thing I did in Photoshop was to soften the images with a 'drybrush' effect, as I thought that the unfiltered images would look too stark against the layout scenery.  That probably would not work as well if there were any buildings in the scene.

I'm still not terribly happy with the sky, it's too monochrome.  I tried painting a white-to-blue vertical gradient, but it's so arid here in Colorado that the paint dries too quickly for me to blend it satisfactorily.  I could have done the sky digitally, but Kinko's wanted $10 per square foot to print out the photo on a 2' x 14' scroll.   If my repair job fails, I may reconsider  :-\

Chuck, thanks for the tip on the glue, I was wondering what to use.



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[chuck geiger]

Ironically, a guy in Colorado was one of the first to get published about the topic of using digital images and model railroading. It's in one of the Kalmbach books and in Model Railroader somewhere. He had the images printed out and applied like the BACKDROP WAREHOUSE images. Real expensive....Also NOT WHITE GLUE. Woodland Scenics tacky glue, I forget the name. Thicker and easier to work with than rubber cement. I use a heat gun on low to fix bubbles or to remove.

Actual picture off the road going to Caliente (Bealville)








Wan't happy with above, closest I came was this and I ended up painting the hills:





This is a tough chore, as Ed says, you have to take all the shots and the same
time and vary them and put them together to fit. This is why most modelers
paint happy hills. Which I hate. Also you are having a light and dark problem between
the scene and the backdrop, which isn't bad, makes it look stormy towards the
mountains and sunny on the loop. Still one of the best modules/layouts of the
Loop I have seen, good job.

[ednadolski]

Looks good, Chuck.   BTW I think maybe that was Doug Tagsold [sp?]  IIRC.

The light/dark is less evident in person. I think the eye compensates but the camera is less forgiving.  The monochrome sky contributes to the darker mood too, it would look sunnier with proper blue/white gradation and some clouds.

One thing with panoramic photos:  unless you are shooting with an overhead sun, the angle of the light changes perspective as you pan from side to side.  That makes it harder to match up different images, and your backdrop shows the disparate angles.  It also tends to make the sky look more washed out in some directions.

The hard part for me tho is getting the foreground/background colors to match really well, whether it's photos or acrylic paints.

[SOUPAC]

My first efforts at using the Bob Ross methods of painting landscapes. Found it pretty easy to do using just plain old latex house paints. A "glaze" was needed to keep it from drying too fast. The middle photo was actually done first. It is painted on the back side of a long strip of linoleum laying on a sheet of plywod. It is not installed on my layout yet. The first one was painted in place on 1/8" masonite hardboard. The intended locale is the Oregon Cascades on my Southern Pacific Cascade Sub, so there will be a lot of fir, hemlock, and cedar trees that are quite tall. I didn't want those 3D trees casting unrealistic photo's on a 2D backdrop. My solution was to purchase the Heki 100-tree forest and cut half the foliage off vertically. I then added some flocking to the remaining half and hot-glued them to the backdrop. Now those shadows will realistically fall on trees just like they should. The result is shown in the bottom photo.

[wm3798]

As a reminder, here's the Backdrops thread...
Lee

[Caleb Austin]

Alright, since Lee reminded me of this thread, heres a little tutorial.

Here are some close shots.



My main advise is to use lots of the sky blue color with your scenery painting. I use plenty of it even on the closest foreground trees because the normal acrylics that I use are much more vivid than real life, it took me a while to realize this but its true. It does a great job of creating distance. I also use white and black a lot to lighten and darken the colors. I never use the paint right out of the bottle but am constantly mixing to get different shades of the color I am working on at the time. My color pallat thing looks generally like this.:tb-confused:

mix, mix, mix.

[Caleb Austin]

Part 2

One other thing I've learned in regards to the foreground trees is to have 3 green shades, 1 normal, 1 lighter ( not vivid!) and 1 very dark shade. First I stipple down the normal base green, then I come back and stipple in random patches and lines
of the dark greyish green. After that I dry brush a little light green on but not a lot.


Here I am dabbing on some shadows.


All three shade come together.

So, What in the end I've learned the most is to keep things muted. And use plenty of blue with the scenery.