I hope you won’t be offended if I say I like your artist’s statement. Some folks get all cagey when the word art even comes up. I have learned the hard way how difficult it is to even have that conversation. See: http://cs.trains.com/mrr/f/88/t/231838.aspx?page=1
Whether most know it or not, as a model railroader you’re an artist already, although no one will insist anyone be required to call themselves an artist.
I really do mean it that Greg Gray showed me how to do the backdrop. I have no practical experience with painting of this sort. If it’s not a wall or a ceiling or a vehicle, I hardly knew which end of the brush to hold.
I think backdrop painting is just like any other model railroad skill. It can be learned to an acceptable level with surprisingly little effort. You simply have to convince yourself you can do it, then you try it, and pretty soon you’re looking for more inspiration.
It doesn’t have to be as complicated as my Silverton backdrop. Here’s a view of the south end of Durango. It’s not really a prototypical scene, but does help give a sense of exiting the mountains. Sometimes what the layout needs is more important than what the prototype defined and that sort of choice is exactly the sort that an artist makes.
Or you can just stick to doing the simple stuff, which is very effective when framed with 3D scenery.
The landscape behind Rockwood - Low and High, Wide angles
Up the Creek
I also use some “sawtooth” panels at the edges of my peninsula. These act as scenic dividers, but also keep visitor intrusion onto the l
I’m confused. You say you are capable of painting excellent backdrops but it’s the last thing you would ever do, yet you also hate photo back drops. Whats left?
Now I have to say Rob Spangler paints photorealistic back drops (paint, not photos) and his layout is IMO, near the pinacle of home layout realism. The foreground and background fit together very well creating a homogenius scene and one doesn’t seem to be a much higher bar of realism over the other.
As far as photo backgrounds, have you seen the Onondaga Cut-off layout? It uses photographs for back grounds, and it fits very well too.
There is no perfect world, but both have been demonstrated to be very effective when integrated into the layout well.
I’ve seen layouts with cartoonish backdrops too, and those detract even more than the high bar of photo backdrops. IMHO, the goal is to get a back drop which blends in and comliments the scene. It’s not always an easy combination. And lets face it, it depends on ones resources and skills. It’s one thing to say photo backdrops are aweful, even when well executed, but whats the alternative? Many have nothing or a worse.
I do plan on painting my own, and am going to try to integrate in something on the order of Rob’s hand painted back drops. If one wants to keep it simple, what seems to work best are the hazy in-the-distance landscapes - which suggests real sce
I may not have worded the first paragraph of my post too well. What I meant is that I can paint nearly photographically if choose to, but for my tastes, thats not the right thing to do on my railroad. This pic shows a bit of my backdrop. Its very loose, and has some energy, but won’t dominate the view when the rest of the scenery is built.
There are some soft spots around the room, and area where a bit of a storm is brewing, basically it has some variety as you pan around. But not too much.
Not everyones cup of tea, but I painted the entire room in about 90 minutes using 2 shades of blue, white, three 9" paint rollers and 4" and 1" junk brushes from Wally World.
MRVP has some great videos on doing backdrops. I believe they were in Rehab My Railroad Season (the one where they did the station and grade crossing), and Olympia Logging (both seasons). The distant tree thing looks pretty straight-forward.
What do you want your backdrop to accomplish? If you want to do closeup photography, you probably need a photo backdrop or professional painter. My backdrop would fail miserably on Pelle’s layout!
If you need it to extend industrial or city scenes, you might want more realism.
if you are just trying to make a framing reference for your layout, anything from a solid blue color to a very detailed painting would fit the bill. This is all personal preference.
And Mike is right: we’ve all become artists in one form or another while pursuing this hobby. So don’t sell yourself short. If you’ve never painted anything, give it a try. Worst case scenario you get some more white paint and paint over it!
Heres my take on the biggest mistakes made when painting a backdrop (this refers to skies and landscapes):
Colors are too bright. Keep them muted, unless you are modeling the South Pacific. We are primarily looking at horizons, and there’s a lot of dust between us and the horizon.
Edges are too hard. Keep them soft if at all possible. When paint is still wet, take a big brush and smush around the edges of hills and mountains. It will give the illusion of distance.
Look at your work from a distance. It’s too easy to paint from the perspective of arms length (or less) because that’s what we are looking at while painting. When in fact you will be much further away when looking at the finished scene. What it looks like up close doesnt matter (Unless you are into the closeup photography thing).
If someone else doesn’t like it, but it’s right for you, tell them to take a hike. Other people’s opinions do not matter unless you ask for it. Art is subjective. As a wise art teacher once told me “People who think they are right about art aren’t.”
Yes, that cloud backdrop is not my cup of tea. To me it really dominates the view with a forboading, “storm is brewing”, type of feeling. It appears back drops can often be not just a quality thing, but a personal thing.
When it came to painting, I took color strips from my local Lowes or Home Depot and went outside and compared them to the real sky, which does vary from horizon (lighter) to straight up over head (deepest blue).
On my last layout I went with Valspar Clear Blue Sky paint:
Some go with a darker blue but since sky nearer to the horzon is typically lighter - which is usually what you would see above the rail scenes for the first 2 or 3+ feet , and nin many cases hazier, it makes more sense to go with a light shade of blue and then you can do clouds or haze over it.
In “the olden days” (like the 1990’s), one method of doing a backdrop was to find a scene you liked and take some color slides of it. Then in the layout room, you could project the slide image onto your backdrop, and use the photo as a template for painting the backdrop scenery.
No need to hire anyone for a backdrop. Are you wanting to focus attention on the trains or the backdrop? The choice is natural and you want to draw the eye to what’s moving. Focusing on the still stuff is crazy since most of the money should get focused on the train, scenery, and structures. These matter far more than the backdrop.
yup, they are definitely subjective. For some people, a flat blue color punches the ticket just fine. Others want or even require photorealism. I want some energy in a few choice spots. Eventually that storm cloud will be brewing over a mountain/valley with about 5 vertical feet from valley floor to mountain top. That will substantially diminish the visual impact of the storm clouds. In the photo, with no scenery yet, there’s nothing else to look at, so it’s all your eyes see.
Flat blue is really just a start, a basic thing to have in place on which other things can be added, such as clouds or hopefully a scene of landscape or city scape. The energy I get from the cloud scene gives me the “feeling” I need to seek shelter! j/k [:O] [:P]
I get it. Its much the same as home yard landscaping. New houses are piled on one another these days, and homeowners think they have to fill the yard with a bunch of foliage to screen out the neighboring houses. What makes a big difference is just a few trees or shrubs. When there is somehting in between you and the neighbors house, it give the eye something to catch which in turn pushes the neighboring house into the background making it look farther away.
Not exactly the same concept, but the eye needs many things to look at in order to not focus solely on one thing.
Having said that, I like a simple pale light blue backdrop to focus the eye on the trains, with only low relief hazy hills to represent some distance. There will be a river and hill seen on my next layout and I’ll probably use photo backdrops there in order to give depth to an area one would expect to see detail close up. The rest of the layout will have the low hazy humps representing hills in the distance.
In the northern Virginia area, you don’t just think you have to screen out neighboring houses, in some neighborhoods you want badly to do it. Where I lived last, I was cheek to jowl with neighbors and you need a little privacy just for santities sake. But it wasn’t worth “investing” that much in foliage where I was where the standard of living and quality of life was declining every year, so my wife and I just put a temporay gazebo on our back deck and tied on privacy screens on the sides so everyone was staring at you from many directions.
Where I live now, yeah, that would be an improvement, but it’s a different neighborhood. Still, you can’t always choose your neighbors and as luck would have it, that gazebo is going to come in handy at the new home too.
As the OP, I considered all your answers. I found an artist on craigslist that sold small painting and offered to paint anything you wanted. I contacted her and after exchanging some info on what I wanted, she estimated $150-$200 total to paint my 2 ft x 40 ft backdrop. I did not think that was bad. Less than half the cost of commercial backdrops to cover same area.
She lives almost 3 hours away from me so she would paint the backdrop in sections (like wallpaper) but not sure yet what medium she might use. The challange is that my layout is in an area that is subject to temperature and humidity extreemes. Need to resolve that issue to my satisfaction before moving forward.
Another issue is how well she can represent city scapes and industrial areas on a backdrop. To me, landscale background with trees, hills, rocks and clouds should be very easy for an artist. However, I would expect that the details in a city or industrial scene would be much more challanging and difficult to render in an acceptable way (backdrop vs framed painting). I still have to work this issue with her. I have seen some of her work but none of it would be comparable to a city or industrial scene.
In case others are interested doing something like this, I will report on how this worked out. Right now, my gut tells me she will not be able to render the city/industrial scenes to my liking.
Side note - I am still considering some of the commercial photo backdrops but I have made some disturbing discoveries about them. I will save that info for a different thread.
I made a decision on the painted backdrops by a local artist. I will not go that route. In the end, I was not convinced that an artist could render the city building and industrial sites to a level of detail that I was confortable with. I know the clouds, hills, trees and other natural features would not be a problem but I was not satisfied that the details on man made stuff would make me happy.
I am now focused on photo backdrops and other similar stuff. I will be posting a seperate thread asking question about that type of material.
