Build Model Railroad Scenery for Depth and Realism

One of the easiest ways to enhance your backdrop is by adding clouds. Now you can use a cotton or a modeling airbrush If you wanna add some wispy clouds even a sponge works well. If you don't have a lot of artistic talent, you can buy cloud stencils. These are made by New London Industries and they're basically a heavy cardboard that has a nice frilly edge on it. That looks like a cloud. So what you do would be to hold this about an inch or two away from your backdrop and use some white spray paint in one area to create the top of a cloud. And the reason that you're not holding a directly up against it is to give it a nice feathered edge. A nice soft edge. Once you do the top, you can do the bottom with perhaps another part of the stencil and get some nice clouds that way. You can add some scenery behind your scenery by using photographic backdrops. Now, if you're artistically talented and can paint a backdrop border if you wanna paint mountains or forest or farmland on there and can paint that more power to you if you don't have much artistic talent, as I do not you can use photographs. With digital photographs nowadays it's extremely easy to add whatever kind of backdrop you want. In this case, I went out and I took a picture of a corn field. I took actually a Panorama of four shots of the corn field. And I liked this particular area because there's no vertical obstructions there's no telephone poles or streetlights or any of that kind of stuff. It's pretty much a clearer shot. However, you can invest under a hundred dollars in photo editing software, such as Adobe Photoshop elements. It doesn't take much to learn the techniques that you would need to use to enhance a backdrop or to take things out of a backdrop. You don't certainly don't have to learn every first step of that program. And again, as I said, it's relatively inexpensive. So in this case, I took this picture of this cornfield, but as you can see compared to the track in front of me here the cornstalks are way out of proportion. They're way too large. So what I did in the photo editing software, was to take two photographs and kind of blend them together. And that's again out of my Panorama of four making the cornstalks much more in scale. In the case where you're taking a Panorama, one of the downsides is that you're standing in one spot and pivoting and you tend to get these curved edges on things like that. But that's easy enough to change in the photo editing software. And in this case, what I did was I just took some of the corn stocks that were in the right scale in the front and just kind of cloned them on to this area over here so it doesn't look so curved. Next step that you would do would be to cut the sky out of your photograph and the reason that you do that is because obviously you're never gonna get the sky in the photograph to match the color of the sky that you've used for your backdrop. So you wanna cut along the edge, cut along the horizon, leave a little bit of the blue of the sky from your photograph on your backdrop here because what you don't want is the hard edge of an X-ACTO knife along the horizon drawing attention to itself. So if you leave just a little bit of that blue on there, you really won't see it when it's up against the backdrop. And it'll keep that edge a little bit fuzzy. And that's exactly what I've done here. This is that same shot of the cornfield. Perhaps you can see that I've got just a little bit of that blue showing behind the trees here. And when you put that up against the backdrop, you just really never noticed that blue. Then you want to build some scenery in front of it again so that you don't draw attention to the backdrop. In this case, I've got a three-dimensional cornfield in HO scale. And when you put that cornfield up against the backdrop, it blends in really nicely. And suddenly you've got a nice field where that looks like it goes far beyond the backdrop. And as I said you can certainly do that with forested areas, with trees. Here's a piece of a backdrop. I haven't cut the sky out of it yet but you can see even adding trees behind it really enhances the look of what would be normally a narrow shelf on your layout. So those are some ways to enhance the backdrop. You've seen how to paint the backdrop, adding a backdrop to your model railroad really brings your model railroad into what looks like a real world.