Xīn lóng International - Trees & Backgrounds

Realistic looking backgrounds have always been an issue for my airport models. The terminal area is now 8ft wide, which means I can't pilfer backgrounds from elsewhere easily, plus they have to fit into a depth of field that matches the terminal. Once you have a background then it gets really tricky as you have to print it. After many years of thinking about this I have however finally solved the problem. Here's how...

Terminal 1 sits in front of the new finished background of trees, buildings and hills

I get my backgrounds from the excellent Airport Diorama Designs site. They can be printed using my work colour printer, however covering many pieces of paper there are two problems:

1. how to hide the unsightly joins between the many pages
   
2. how to stick them onto anything without bubbling, marks etc
   

For my older smaller Dowse National diorama I had gotten the background professionally printed but even then it wasn't perfect. It turned out too dark once it had been finished. It was also expensive and now I needed a background twice as long. The answer was to make my own.

Inspiration for this approach was taken from a post I read by Gavin Miller whose exceptional Perth diorama is an exemplar to us all. The first thing to do was get some backing wood. In fact I was able to get this offcut from the local hardware store for nothing. It was just a big piece of ply. Then I bought some blue and white spray paints and got down to business. Two coats of blue created a sky and using the white at varying distances I was able to create clouds.

The next step was apply the middle distance and that is where the purchased background came in. It is easy to hide the paper join lines when there are buildings and foliage so instead of using the whole background I cut out the parts without sky on them. Even better where the outline was too complex to cut around I could use the different colour of the sky vs my new sky to create the appearance of hills in the distance.

Fake hills form a background feature where cutting around the buildings was painful!

Best of all the construction of this entire background took only an afternoon as the spray paint dries very quickly. Also I was able to reuse buildings to make the background as long as I needed.

I had managed to pickup some small modelling trees from a collectables fair in Auckland for only a few bucks. Now I just needed something to attach them to. A look around the hardware store came across these green scouring pads. I fugured they were perfect as I could cut them into strips, stick the trees into them and they already look like grass. I cut some strips and worked out which trees to go where.

These then slotted between the board and background for an instant treeline.

Add in the background and I think it looks great. It was so easy in the end I can't believe I hadn't tried this years ago. As you can see though I do need to extend one end a bit.

This has been one of the most successful parts of my work so far. No more mucking about with images after they're taken to get rid of paper join lines for me. Plus the whole diorama now joins together as one whole.