I have 115’ of wall that I’d like to add a photo backdrop to my HO railroad currently under construction. It’s at the stage where it’s time to do this. Layout room is conditioned and the walls are painted sheet rock. Any help appreciated as I don’t know where to start! Thanks so much!
Hi Jim,
You have 115’ eh?!? What most of us would give to have your problem…[swg][(-D][(-D]
Seriously, you have a lot of options. Here is one method for making your own photo backdrops. Credit goes to Mark Pruitt:
*"*First I photographed the area I wanted to make into the backdrop. I used my Galaxy Edge 7 cellphone camera. It’s surprisingly good - 12 megapixels. I took about 200 photos, most just normal shots, but a dozen or so in panoramic mode. I’d never used panoramic mode, so I was learning as I go.
Then I went home and loaded all the pictures onto my computer, where I could see them on a larger monitor. I could see that many of them were not very suitable.
Next I downloaded some photo stitching software packages - the free and trial versions. None of them worked very well. I got blurry mish-mashes of the individual photos, none of which were at all suitable.
At this point I was pretty disappointed. I thought nearly the whole photo trip had been a waste. Then I decided to take another look at a couple of the panoramas.
I put them aside at first because they all came out looking like this:
Jim, I am far from expert on backdrops. I have 76 feet of wall compared to your 115 feet of wall. Currently, I have 24" x 48" sheets of Masonite lining the walls. The Masonite sheets are painted a shade of sky blue, but that is it - - not even clouds.
One issue you face is budget. If you choose to purchase commercially produced backdrops, it is going to cost a small fortune.
Another issue is content. Dave mentioned Mark’s photo produced background scenes but those scenes are mostly prairie in the foreground and hills in the background. If you also want structures on your backdrops, finding the right scenes will be more of a challenge.
Another issue is era. I model the Chicago area in the 1950s. That makes it a lot tougher to find scenes of old buildings to photograph when so much from the 1950s is now gone and replaced by more modern structures.
Another issue is material used to produced the backdrops, paper versus wood product versus plastic. Wayne has used styrene plastic, purchased as 48" x 96" for some of his projects. The advantage of styrene plastic sheet over Masonite board or thin wood product is the ability to shape it around curves.
One thing that I have considered is to find an art student or starving artist to paint the desired scenes on my backdrops. I could do it myself except for the fact that I am totally incompetent as a artist.
Rich
I have been in the hobby for 40 years. I have never gotten to point of detailing a backdrop (in theory this should be done before the benchwork is in the way, but it doesn’t seem to work out that way).
So my approach will be based upon what others have done and what I have seen.
I have about 75 linear feet around three walls of shelf style layout. Georgia Piedmont being the locale. IOW, lots of trees and foliage.
I’m thinking of practicing the Bob Ross method of making forests on the backdrop, where there is really just a big blend of paint strokes and different shades of green with a few exposed trunks here and there for definition. Then placing store bought trees in front of the backdrop for more 3D effect. If I mess up, I can roll out the blue again and start over.
For the two towns with buildings, I will leave the backdrop a simple sky blue. My attention will be drawn to switching the trains and the detailed foreground. The and the lack of detail on the backdrop won’t really be noticed. At least that’s the plan.
I use the styrene sheets mostly for scratchbuilding structures, like this station…
.JPG)
…but for backdrops, simply painted the drywalled, after coving all ten of the corners in the layout room using 1/8" Masonite.
Here’s a sketch of the layout room, showing all ten corners. The grey area is where the partial second level was to be added, and it’s now in place and operable, although nowhere near “finished”.
Right from the beginning, I had planned to eventually add a partial second level to the layout, so the “sky” in that area had been done as two distinct scenes…
Here’s one of the coved inside corners, getting some modification to accommodate the addition of the partial second level…
…and one of the coved outside corners…
…another coved outside corner, this one bulged out to accommodate a drain pipe…
…the gap left to allow
Wow! Thanks for all the detailed information! Certainly enough for me to pour over the next couple of evenings! Yes, the cost is staggering to purchase these back drops! I am looking at about $1,300.00 at this point. Thanks again! - Jim