Seriously, it's so scary to contemplate painting a backdrop. But as long as you have a small "fan brush", some grey paint and some green paint, you can have one in just a couple of hours. (That's assuming you have something the right size to paint on - in this case a friend brought me this surplus sheet of 0.1" (2mm) styrene after he was done with his backdrops, which happened to be the right height, so it basically fell in my lap.) Five layers of paint total: Distant mountains (light grey), closer mountains (slightly darker light grey), distant trees (forest green lightened with a little white), and closer trees (forest green). I found that the layers dried enough in about 2 hours that I got the whole 8' piece of 0.1" styrene done in one day of intermittent bursts of painting, while I was doing lots of other things (while also "stuck at home" due to the pandemic, of course). Here's the photographic evidence.
Above is the whole sheet of styrene laid out on the workbench, with a layer of "distant grey" slapped on there. Below is a section showing the application of "closer grey" applied just in one area, since the whole thing will be mostly covered up by trees.
Now we see the wet second layer of slightly darker green on top of the lighter green. Just a subtle difference in shade is enough to get the effect.
It's absolutely amazing how much this simple thing improves the operation of my simple On30 shelf layout. I wish I had thought of this back when I started building it over a dozen years ago!
It would look even better if I would change out the lighting from the old incandescent Christmas tree bulbs to modern LED strips with a more realistic color temperature. Some day!
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