Hello all,
I'm looking for some background buildings for a medium sized city (pop. 5000-10000) set in 1950's Appalachia. I've already looked through tomkats buildings and have found a few that I liked but need some more to fill out the space between the mountains.
I guess what I'm trying to ask is if there are any sources or techniques you guys (or gals) use to model cities on your backdrop. I'm open to anything from low-relief to flats to printed pictures.
Thanks in advance for the help.
Jacob
Walthers makes a number of background buildings, most are industrial. Any full building from Walthers, Design Preservation (now owned by Woodland Scenics), Smalltown or others could be shortened to make them a background low relief building. DPM has a few that are just the building fronts.
Evan Designs makes a program called Model Builder where you can design buildings, and print them out to glue to your backdrop. It is best to use photo paper, then spray them with a clear coat as inkjet inks are not moisture proof. I have this software and it gives good results. They also have add-on programs to design brick walls, windows and signs that are not included in Model Builderhttp://www.modeltrainsoftware.com/modeling-software.html
You can see some of the buildings I have done with Model Builder on the right side behind the low relief buildings
George In Midcoast Maine, 'bout halfway up the Rockland branch
Here are the links to my background buildings & billboard and signs.
Buildings:
http://cs.trains.com/TRCCS/forums/t/190349.aspx
Billboars & Signs:
http://cs.trains.com/TRCCS/forums/t/162879.aspx
Feel free to copy for your layout. Post some photos so others can see how the buildings can give you some depth and the signs make it more life like.
Jacob,
There are so many things you can do.
In this photo, my husband painted the clouds, hills, and trees directly on the sheetrock. I put Walthers' Instant buildings on gaitor foam board for the next layer. Some of the fill in buildings are custom from the Evan Designs software. Plant 4 is from Walthers' background buildings. The other background buildings I scratch built from DPM sections.
We wanted some background for our staging, so we used the industrial buildings with a park painted in between the industrial sections. These are Walthers' instant buildings on the gaitor foam.
I would get some photos of the era and use them for ideas.
Have fun, Sue
Anything is possible if you do not know what you are talking about.
You can also buy long printed sheets of background scenes. Go to Walthers and search for "background" and you'll get both buildings and printed sheets.
It takes an iron man to play with a toy iron horse.
I've cut and pasted some of Tom's buildings, very helpful.
But I also needed some specific buildings to set the scene for a specific location. So I used Google's image search and found pics of where I needed (Silverton, CO, in my case.) Then I Photoshopped them to get the proper size. I then cut the images out, glued them to black foamboard, then cut the foamboard to match the images. Prop it in place and there you are -- instant city.
Obviously, you can also do much the same thing, except getting the exact angles and views you need, if you're close enough for you to take pics of an existing prototype, the process them in Photoshop or other image manipulation program. I don't use it, but most programs have the capability to stitch multiple images together into a panoramic image, which can be useful in making backgrounds of any kind.
In fact, next time I'm in Silverton, I plan to get a set of specific images that will work even better for this location on my layout. The good thing about this method is that the materials are so cheap, you can just throw it away once you produce a better replacement.
Mike Lehman
Urbana, IL