I am using a couple of tall (10-12 story) flats together with pieces of a photo backdrop on my layout. This is my first attempt at this. I am trying to find the best option for what to put on the wall behind the flat. I tried black paint but it did not look good. With a light color I was not happy. I thought I read somewhere of gluing something to the wall to given the appearance of an interior, like newpaper or magazine pages or something like that. Maybe even a colered page of flowers or something similar? Maybe I am totally remembering incorrectly but I thought I saw something like that somewhere. Any ideas? I do not have the patience to detail every window at this point so want to find an easier way. Thanks in advance.
At first, I was thinking you were talking about something like a background scene, sky, hills or more distant buildings. Then I picked up that you were just looking for what would be seen through the windows of the buildings, is that correct?
What kind of buildings are they, office, apartments or industrial? Since most background buildings are to give the illusion of being far away, usually not much detail is given. If you look at a distant building you see little but the reflection of light off the windows. Most background buildings I have seen are an inch or so in depth, then have a solid sheet of styrene or foam board to keep the viewer from seeing through the building, this is usually black. You said you didn’t care for the black, how about something like a glossy light gray to look like reflecting light. If the use of the building would have curtains, you could glue some small pieces of cardstock to look like partially pulled drawn shades. Also could hang some tissue curtains each side of some of the windows. Industrial buildings sometimes have tinted windows, one I know of had a green tint to all the windows.
Your discription of what you remembered seeing sounds to me more like foreground buildings, where you can see inside easily, then a floor pattern, walls, furniture and figures do make a difference to the viewer.
You are right in that I am talking about seeing into the building-it’s an industrial building, flat on the wall, in the back of the scene. It’s in the back but you can see inside. At least I can-I may be too picky. perhaps a shade of gray will work better, I will try that thanks. It’s just that I thought I remembered seeing somewhere a trick with some sort of paper…thanks for your input
that, my friend, is very well done. As the buildings I have are much larger I did not want to have to detail window by window. I think I will try the dullcoat idea, that may work well for me. many thanks!
I snuck up the opaqueness when spraying the backs of the window panes with the thinned dullcote, one light coat at a time and letting it dry for a few minutes. The windows are all Tichy products, don’t know what material Tichy uses for the “glass”, it’s very thin, but the dullcote hasn’t seemed to hurt it any. The concrete type building with the muti-paned industrial windows is nearly a year old.
At the distances involved combined with the limited visual access (scale size windows), very little effort is needed to imply interior details. If you paint the wall behind the building with some sort of neutral color (grey, beige, pastel blues and greens, etc.), you can then add random vertical and/or horizontal lines of various lengths using markers or paint pens of contrasting but still fairly neutral colors (black, dark greys/browns/blues/greens, etc.). When viewed through the building windows, these simple lines will imply the presence of furniture, equipment and/or other details. Spraying the insides of the windows with Dullcote would further enhance this deception.
AAAAhhhh, now that is the type of tip I saw, something along those lines (np pun intended) where you could make the appearance of the interior with some trick like that. thanks!
I’ve got some industrial buildings where I used Canopy Cement to “glaze” the windows. Canopy Cement dries hard and clear, but it’s not flat. Instead, it’s like a lens, and you can’t focus on anything inside. So, you can put lights in there without modeling an interior, and no one can tell.
I also put “real” interiors in a lot of my buildings.
This is the DPM “M.T. Arms Hotel” kit, which I divided inside with foamboard:
The walls and floors are nothing more than stuff I printed on the computer - walls and floors are downloaded images sized to fit the rooms.
Here, again, I found an image of a factory interior and printed it out. I built a catwalk from foamboard and styrene, which gave the illusion of a factory interior without any serious investment in either materials or time.
You can make quite good interiors with only a small amount of work, if you want to do it.
I often use Google images to find an appropriate picture, glue it to a piece of foam core (foam board), and mount it about an inch inside the window. This only takes about 10 minutes per room.
General background wall color is somewhat purpose-driven. Industrial and older office buildings went in for pastel medium green, or a fairly light grey. Hotels and residences will have pictures on the walls. Seen through dullcote-hazed windows, file cabinets and such can be simulated with simple rectangles (dark green, dark grey or black) marked on the room wall with a square-tip marker. For a factory, Google up photos of industrial machines, photo-edit them to appropriate size and print them out, then use them as overlays on the solid color back wall.
Obviously your structures are meant to be background mood-setters, not warranting much fancy detailing. What I noted above can be put on total disregard if your layout never gets dark (I operate to a 24 hour clock) or the interior will never be lighted.
Chuck (Modeling Central Japan in September, 1964 - TTTO 24/30)
