backdrops

If you do nothing else to your backdrop, at a bare minimum, go down to the local paint store and buy a quart of mistint flat sky blue paint and a wide brush. The exact shade isn't important, just get something that looks like a sky blue. By looking through the mistint (the "rejects") shelf, you'll often get the paint for very little. Most skies that occur naturally don't have wood grain, so a simple step like this can immensely improve the appearance of a layout in its beginning stages. While you're at it, get a grass green, dirt brown and street grey for the rest of the plywood plains too.

When you start your backdrop painting, remember that you don't always need photo realism for rural or mountainous scenery. Often just a rough shape of the mountain in an appropriate color palette will be sufficient. Closer mountains will have colors that appear similar to your layout's scenery. However, keep in mind that distant mountains on the prototype appear in progressively bluer shades until the mountain is just a "purple mountain majesty" in the distance, so you don't necessarily want to use the same colors as your foreground scenery.

Avoid positioning your backdrop images too high. If the horizon is above eye level, it won't look right to a person standing in front of the layout, and it especially won't look right when you put your camera down at track level.

Adding a backdrop to even a small layout can make the layout look a great deal larger. This scene under construction is on a 4'x6' HO scale layout. Sure, there's a lot going on here, even without the finished scenery, but in hiding part of the layout, your imagination and sense of reality make you believe that there's quite a bit more on the other side.

Make your streets narrower and the details smaller as they approach the backdrop and they will appear longer to your viewers. You can also help the illusion by matching the angles in your backdrop image.