Sorry if this has already been covered, but what does everyone prefer for your backdrops? Do you paint your own?
If are there any places to start if you have zero painting talent?
Aside from painting, does anyone buy Walthers or other backdrops? (They seem to be getting harder and harder to find). E-bay has some outrageously expensive photo-backdrops, but other than that, I haven’t seen much help with backdrops so far.
Best,
Rob
I think that you can do it, just put a few bits of plain ol’ sky blue, and with practice, you’ll get better.
Matthew
Just depends if you want an industrial scene or mountains, either way, just paint the wall behind all blue, then some clouds in (MR from bout a year ago had good article bout backdrops)
here is an interesting like bout atmosphere http://www.trains.com/community/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=37519
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Good idea. Paint blue first, then add layers over that. Sounds easy enough… 
Jawbone
I’ve seen a few done in the Bob Ross style. (happy little trees and rocks) I was thinking about getting one of his how to sets and giving it a shot.
Do you mean the one from this summer where they created a blow-up photo-mural of the Miluwakee Harbor area (after Photo-shopping the seams and artifacts outta it), and fastened it to their harbor area backdrop?
One set of backgrounds I will never use is the Instant Horizons ‘Freight Yards’ and ‘Hotel/Business’ sets - I remember seeing these on so many layouts in MR during the 1970s and 1980s it was not funny - and they don’t even look realistic (For some reason I cannot remember the hotel name, but ‘Dining and Dancing’ was just underneath…) . I realize these are from the days before Photo-murals, but still they could have done a better job.
Also, get some cloud stencils (make them yourself), and spray away with white/light grey on your nice sky-blue background, keeping the stencil a bit away from the surface to get a nice, indistinct feathered edge (That was the topic of a RMC series of articles from a number of years ago, which also included painting mountain/hills - and NOT Bob Ross ‘Happy Trees’ style) - this would certainly be better than the cartoonish Instant Horizons stuff…