Time to paint my backdrop and I’m curious what specific paint colors people are using for their “Sky Blue” color, that would be readily available at places like Home Depot or Sears.
Thanks,
John
Underhill, VT
Thanks for the question, John, as it is very timely for me. I am soon going to be doing my own backdrop, and would like to know the answer.
Here is what I did and it worked for me. Get a can of flat latex wall paint in blue that looks good to you for the sky. Also get a can of white. Work from 100% blue at the top to 100% white at the bottom then blend them. If you look at the horizon you will see that in real life it is always bluer right overhead for a variety of reasons. Then take a drybursh of white and work in***ulous clouds while still wet and then a touch of gray on the bottoms scrubbed in. Don’t do more than three feet at a time because it will dry to quickly. I f it starts to dry to fast dip the brush in water. I was always in awe of those who could do sky backdrops but like everything else the hardest part is starting. I practiced on old cardboard boxes until I perfected my technique. The trash man was confused for awhile but that is a another story.
Martha Stewart Probation Blue
HA HA HA!
I use a WalMart Carolina Blue 9.99 a gallon!!
This is exactly what I did with my backdrops, and it works great. No need for 3-5 different blues and some strange, fancy art technique. Just standardize on one blue, and add more or less white as necessary. My wife now wants me to do this sky treatment in our daughter’s bedroom! (with fluffy clouds, of course)
Hee Hee! But, shouldn’t that be “Probation” Blues?
Thanks for the hints, ndbprr. It makes sense. Did you ever try the cloud ‘template’ technic that others have described? (Cut out a rough cloud-shaped hole from a sheet of cardboard, hold the cardboard a few inches away from the backdrop, already painted blue, and then lightly spray with white paint.)
No I don’t want to use a template for a couple of reasons:
- It will look like stenciling
- You want the edges to blend in not be distinct to give the cloud a depth. Look at real clouds and you will see they blend in to the backdrop unless you are modeling desert where there isn’t enough moisture and then the background is blue.
I model Philadelphia where the summers are 90 degrees and 90%+ humidty. The sky is loaded with moisture and visbility is usually five to eight miles at most before the haze obscures everything so I want to give that impression. My clouds are very soft and almost blend in becasue of the humidity.
Okee doke. Thanks for the reponse.
My buddys layout used stencils for clouds it looks great!
I have used a painted sky blue covering the whole surface than painted in mountains and then sprayed a mist of white until I got the look of far away mountains and feathered the darker blue to a lite blue
this was done with a air brush. For larger aera’s a real good airless
should do a good job. Have fun
Russ Hayes
csxmu, yer darn right it looks great. In fact, everything I see looks great about that layout.
I asked about the stencil because someone described the technique elsewhere, and achieved very impressive results.
Thanks for the confirmation!
If you are doing Philadelphia, don’t you want to start with gray, and then add white. Sorry I couldn’t resist. Actually that’s L.A.
Some people like stencils and get good results, others don’t. There have been a lot of articles over the years on backdrops and sky. There was a very good one recently in MR, that I was thinking of trying.
We are trying something a little different. I bought sky with clouds wallpaper at Home
Depot. Our backdrop walls of 1/8 inch thick hardboard is coved in the corners. We
just painted it today with oil based white high gloss paint. We will next apply the
wallpaper for our finished background. We are hoping for a professional look.
We are taking pictures as we work on finishing the room completely before we start
any benchwork. Hope to find out soon how to post them in a reply. So far, we have
ceiling done, overhead around the room " G " scale deck and valance done, " HO "
valance done ( this is under the " G " decking ) and the " HO " backdrop as mentioned
above close to being done. The background color for " G " is only sky blue paint as
you won’t see much behind the large trains at that height. Also we have painted
both valances flat black as well as the ceiling over the aisles so your eyes will be
attracted to the " HO " layout like a shadow box effect. After the wallpaper we will do
the main " HO " lighting with white, red, and blue lights on separate dimmers to be
able to control morning, day, evening, and night lighting effects. Then on to the floor
covering and finally the benchwork. My son made the comment today that this is the
most finished layout room we have ever had. We think it will be worth the wait.
Ray
well, I haven’t put up my backdrop yet, but when I do, I plan on taking the lazy way to do it. I’ll simply buy a printed paper one, and glue it to the surface!!!
I’m not building a museum display, for gods sake!!!
No, I think you were probably right that Philadelphia is gray (at least the last time I was there) because LA would be dirty brown.[:D]
The paint I used is Glidden’s flat latex, Wild Blue Yonder, from Home Depot. It looks pretty good without any clouds which will be stenciled on later. I do intend to tone down the lower level blue with some white overspray before I add the clouds.
I just finished the backdrop in a 20’ x 20’ train room I had covered with styrene and and curved the corners. I used a method published in MRR where working in about 4’ widths I painted four horizontal bands from top to bottom of backdrop, going from a darker blue on top to two lighter blues and ending with a white. The top band is Dutchboy “Hometown Blues”, the next one “Spacious Skies”, the next one "Sapphire Valley, and the last white. I had a brush for each color. As I finished a band, I used its bru***o feather it into the band above it. I made the feathering irregular. It turned out so good, I’ve decided not to follow up with cloud stencils.
If doing it again, I would paint the top band one shade lighter. It was a little too dark and took a lot of feathering with the 2nd band to blend well. While the color stiips I had were Dutchboy, I took them to a Sherwin Williams store and they recreated the same colors in their paint. I did prep all of the styrene with a flat white latex first. The colors needed only one coat of paint.
I found it important to turn on the recessed lights in the drop ceiling I installed, and view color chips in the light I would use for the RR, and in the band positions. That eliminated a lot of blue colors almost immediately, which seemed to look fine in a store.
Hal
Thanks, donhalshanks. I’ll try this approach myself.
I never tried this with clouds per se, but I suspect that if you used white chalk with gray for shadowing and applied it with cottonballs (like a powderpuff technique), then hit it with some cheap dollar-store hairspray as a fixative, it would be very realistic. I used to teach art…