Backscene painting basics - backdrop to a forest - advice please

[Mol_PMB]

I'm building an O scale layout in my garage, permanently built in. Before I started I insulated and lined the building, plasterboarded it and painted it all a pale bluish-grey as a neutral 'sky' colour.

 

Now that I'm starting to add some proper scenery, I think I need to paint a bit more in the 'backscene' than just sky, and I'd like some advice as this isn't something I've done before. The area I'm looking at now will have a couple of rows of largish conifer trees against the backscene, roughly mocked up here, though I chose a bad place to do it in front of the window - in most places the sky-coloured wall carries on up.

 

I want it to look like the forest keeps going behind that. So immediately behind the two rows of 3-dimensional trees the wall needs to be nearly black with perhaps a suggestion of trunks and branches, while behind the treetops there should be more treetops visible a bit like these three photos (which is the place I'm modelling):

Note that I have no need or desire to represent the mountains in the background.

 

It doesn't need to be perfect, just to give a better impression than the pale blue-grey showing through behind the trees which is what I've got at the moment. There's quite a big area to cover (perhaps 2 square metres) so I need something that comes in tins bigger than Humbrol!

 

Three questions spring to mind:

• What sort of paints should I use? I'm thinking something that can be blended in a pallette or even in-situ on the wall.
• Am I better off brushing or spraying? My gut feel is brushing as that will be easier to make suggestions of trunks, branches etc.
• I'm wondering about representing the tops of the third row of trees by sticking some scatter material (matching the full 3D trees) to the wall. Does that sound like a good plan or a recipe for disaster?

 

I have plenty of trees, but not enough space for more than two rows of 3-dimensional trees in most places.

 

Any thoughts would be very welcome, especially on the best type of paint to use.

 

Cheers,

Mol

[PJBambrick]

Take a tree from the box and colour match it exactly with artist acrylics, then practice copying it by stippling the foliage with an old splayed out brush about 5mm wide.  Just keep going till you get the knack and you can't tell them apart

 

The main thing with trees though, is to paint what's behind them first, so drop in a curved piece of white mounting card behind, and work out the background using 'Generate a panorama'

 

Yours is very interesting.....

[Mol_PMB]

Many thanks, that's really helpful!

It sounds like step 1 is for me to visit Fred Aldous in town and get a selection of acrylic paints in greens and browns.

There seems to be plenty of choice:

https://www.fredaldous.co.uk/collections/acrylic-paint

I'll have a bit of a practice before I actually start painting the wall.

 

There's certainly plenty of interesting scenery in the middle and far distance in my little bit of Switzerland, but I'm not sure I can do justice to it in the space available. I've had to twist, compress and contort the geography of the branch line so much that I'm not sure the distant geography would make sense any more. I'm modelling the whole branch line rather than just one location, and have had to compress about 5km in reality down to a scale 1.6km (36m on the model in 1:45 scale).

I'll give it some thought, because the plain sky above the treetops won't be suitable everywhere. The 'Generate a panorama' tool certainly looks interesting, and I'll have a play with that.

 

Some more gratuitous photos of mine showing distant scenery...

Generic hills and trees:

The village of Broc and the 'Dents de Broc' (toothy mountains):

The ancient fortress town of Gruyeres on the hilltop above the railcar:

Gruyere lake (left distance) and more mountains:

 

[Jeff Smith]

First the acrylic paints I use for backscenes are the craft type in plastic bottles not the artists tube type.  These are a lot cheaper and usually have a good range of greens and earth colours.  A fan brush is useful, especially for fir trees.  You probably need to settle on the type of lighting for the layout because the trees you have will look different in different lighting.  You could try clipping the branches off the back of a tree to see how it would look hard up to the backscene - a difficulty with backscenes is shadows from things in front, not so bad if the background is dark but looks bad on open sky.

 

Study pictures of trees and practice, you might even want to paint on card or something that you can attach to your back structure.  Tree trunks are seldom brown, usually shades of grey and adding highlights like sun on trunks or top foliage can add realism.   But ultimately you want the backscene to be present but not detract from the model.  Distant hills should not be clearly defined with no detail to attract your gaze and be in lightish colours greens, greys and purples.

[Mol_PMB]

Many thanks, some really good thoughts there.

The lighting is already installed (has been for a decade since I started this long-stalled project) and is T5 fluorescent. 
 

Today I have trial-fitted some trees (drilled holes and dropped them in) to get a feel for what it looks like with lots of them:

The shadows don’t look too bad. There’s definitely a need for a darker background behind the trees, and some representation of more treetops behind them. 
I’m also considering more tree trunks up against the wall - could just be painted kebab skewers or similar. 

Possibly some 2” or 3” bottle-brush treetops on the windowsill, colour-matched to the big trees? 

Thanks for all the thoughts and ideas!

 

 

 

[Jeff Smith]

I make trees with springy multi-strand wire, unraveled and then covered with hot glue.  The trunks of your trees look too thin, perhaps they could be thickened with hot glue.  Also I would vary the heights a little and try varying the colours a shade or two with green washes.  These are 4mm deciduous trees but I tried to vary the sizes and colours.

 

[Mol_PMB]

I'll put a few photos here as a work-in-progress. Much more to do but already it's looking a lot better.

 

The first step was to paint a very dark brown band on the wall, like this:

 

Then yesterday I took a tree to the Fred Aldous shop and compared it to dozens of different green acrylic paints until I found a good match, which was the one shown in this photo. I also got a slightly lighter shade of olive gree, plus some black and brown.

Then I experimented on some scraps of board until I had a process for the treetops. I made a crude stencil out of thin card and used that to paint the 'horizon' of treetops:

Then I filled in underneath, using diagonal strokes (rather crudely I confess). This photo is a little over-exposed but it shows the effect quite well:

The next step I've only just tried so far, which is to mix up a slightly darker shade of the green, and then use a different stencil to paint in the shapes of individual, nearer trees. Seen to the left hand side of this photo. My plan is that I will then use a splodging/stippling technique with a paler green over these, to give an impression of the foliage. Hopefully that will give an intermediate step of detail between the 3-dimensional trees and the very simple representation of the distant trees.

Sorry this is all rather crude, I'm no artist! But I think it's got potential and from normal viewing distances I think it will be fine, and a massive improvement on the 'sky' colour behind the trees.

So far, I've painted the distant treetop horizon so it drops beow the windowsill. I'll see how this looks when it's all done, my other option is to extend the green up to the windowsill and to put some small 3-dimensional trees on the windowsill itself.

 

Thanks for all the advice and hopefully I'll do it some sort of justice.

Mol

[Mol_PMB]

Many thanks for the advice and encouragement, this is the result. I'm pretty pleased with my forest now, and need to get on with the meadows and the track!