Discovered a way to get really accurate colors for painted backdrops. Just take a digital photo of anything from sky to distant mountains, blow it up on your computer until you have a section of one color that you want, and then take it down to your local Lowe's where you will find that they have a color-sensing computer that will mix paint specifically to an exact match for your photographed color -or colors.
To get an accurate color reproduction of our local mountains I first went out on a nice clear day and took telephotos of the darkest parts of (A) the more distant mountain ranges, (B) the distant mountain's front ranges, (C) the foothills below the front ranges, and (D) the sky just above the horizon.
I then went down to Lowe's and came home with 4 quarts of paint, and painted the entire backdrop sky blue, overspraying a thin coat of gray- brown near the horizon to mimic southern California's smog. Then using the photos for reference I pencil-sketched the skyline of the most distant mountains on the dry backdrop and filled them in with the appropriate color. (Color "A")
When *that* was dry I mixed a bit of sky blue into a pint or so of color "A" -just enough to tell a difference- and using the photos for reference again stippled in the lighter parts of the distant mountains where they were in direct sunlight. The effect is subtle, just suggesting dimensionality, but you have to look twice to see that it's paint and not a photo.
I then repeated the same process for the front range peaks which are darker in tone (Color "B") because they're several miles closer to the viewer; again mixing a *slightly* lighter second coat of "B" and using it for stippled highlights to bring out the depth.
Next, I drew the foothill's profile in and filled it in with the dead grass yellow that covers our southern California hills in late spring/ early summer. The foothills are close enough for some detail to be seen by the nekked eyeball, so I spent an evening or two adding patches of sagebrush and the like, again using the original photos as a rough guide and the end of a stiff brush to stipple them in.
Lastly, I eyeballed a few of the local Cottonwood trees that commonly grow in and around the seasonal watercourses at the bases of our foothills, and painted a couple of dozen of them in as if seen from a mile ar so away. (LIttle blotches of light green, with greyish-brown trunks suggested rather than being painfully reproduced in detail.)
Now: understand that up until now my sum total of artistic knowledge had sprung from painting a number of full-scale second-hand cars, three 1 to 1 houses, and a number of HO locomotives and other rolling stock. But I seem to have fallen into something interesting here by accident.
By *not* trying to put in anything but the right colors -with more-or- less correct profiles and shading- and ignoring distant details completely, I've got a mildly impressionistic backdrop that creates a really successful feeling of depth while drawing your eyes to the front of the layout where you *want* them to be anyway.
The lack of fine detail in the background seems to let your vision just slide over it without distracting your attention from the trains and other foreground detail.
I'm not sure that the same idea would work in a situation where you're trying to give the impression of mountains that are up-close-and- personal, but simplification while at the same time using the same colors that your eyes are used to translating as "distant mountains" seems to fool the mind into thinking that there's more there than meets the eye.
~Pete