With a design in mind, I started by painting the backdrop. I did this before putting in the basic foreground scenery structure because the foreground would make it difficult to paint the distant hills.

I followed the approach outlined in Dave Frary’s “Realistic Model Railroad Scenery” book. First I painted the sky; then I added a line of distant trees. I used cheap flat acrylic paints picked up at the local Michael’s arts and craft store and used a simple foam brush for both:

Here’s a picture of the module with these two areas painted in:

The cardboard mockups are standing in for the station/warehouse building at the dock and the water tank. I then added a second line of distant trees on top of the first line. This second line of trees was a slightly more intense green that the first. I also used a little spray of flat white enamel at this point to increase the illusion of distance.

Finally, I switched to a bristle brush and followed the Hales’ method of painting trees as described in recent issues of Railroad Model Craftsman: you just get a little bit of paint on the end of the bristle brush and just daub it onto the backdrop. This works very well for recreating Ontario forests. I squeezed out several shades of green onto my palette (a margarine tub lid) and then mixed different shades for blotting. I finally went back with a fine brush and some grey / white / black paint and painted on some tree trucks. There are a fair number of white birch trees in this area and I wanted to capture them on the backdrop.

I’m pretty pleased about how the backdrop turned out. It looks great without a lot of work. Here’s the east end of the module:

Unfortunately, I did not match the colours of the backdrop to the ground foam I was using and later on had to go back and repaint the trees. I strongly recommend purchasing your ground foam early and matching the backdrop colours to it.