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One thing I cannot stand is a store-bought backdrop. In my opinion, such a generic approach does exactly the opposite of what we expect scenery to do, which is to place the railroad into a real-world setting. By denying the specifics of your geography and setting, you relegate your rail line to traversing a bunch of Nowhere-Specifics, which is little better than simply placing track on a finished wooden shelf. I saw an article in MR a long ways back that described a technique of painting that began with projecting photographic slides onto the blank backdrop, tracing out the major shapes in pencil then turning off the projector to paint in a sort of color-by-number method. Of course, this means acquiring some decent slide images, which means a railfanning trip to wherever you're modelling. Which, of course, is an undue hardship, right? These days you can do something similar with digital photos, which on the computer can be enlarged to whatever size they need to be, and also be edited using Photoshop or other similar software, to get rid of out-of-scale elements and unwanted detail. With practice, you can learn how to piece together multiple shots to create long panoramas, and then once you've got it all done it can be printed out by a specialty printer (hey, maybe even Kinko's), possibly even onto a heavy stock or vinyl. I would suggest painting your own sky blue and then doing everything else below the horizon as a separate cutout; even if there's only 1/16 of an inch of separation between sky and ground, your eye perceives it and you get the feeling that the sky continues endlessly, and that you're really looking at a horizon.
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