Railway Historical
and Modeling Society
Layout Photos
Painting the Backdrop
When you look at the sky on a sunny day, and what other kind of day would you want to show on a layout, the sky is a hazy almost white at the horizon but as you tilt your head back and look up, the sky is more blue. It is a subtle thing but adds so much to the overall look of the layout.
We thought we would use 3 shades of paint, but in the end, just used 2. We had a "sky" blue paint added to the top third of the backdrop and then an off white for the lower third of the backdrop. Then we mixed some of the paint for the middle third. We didn't mix the paint in a bucket we just rolled some blue on the middle third and then rolled some white on it. This shows Paul Brown on the left blending some of the paint after I added some blue to the top, and the other shade in the middle and the white below.
Here is Paul doing some of the blending. We used a paint additive that slows the drying of the paint which helped in doing the next step the blending. We did use 3 rollers in the process. One for the blue, one for the white and one for the blending. This is a good image of the blending.
This is a good example of the blended paint. At first it just looks like a blue backdrop but as you look a little harder you can see the lighter shade at the surface of the benchwork. This is a inside corner where I used a sheet of styrene for the coved corner. The styrene was fastened to the wallboard with liquid nails and the edges blended with drywall compound before it was painted.
This is an older image of the layout before I painted the fascia, but you can see the blue at the top of the scene and the white at the horizon.
