business interior sheets


illyad2

New Member
I am looking to add an interior aspect to my HO scale buildings, i.e photograph sheets that give the impression of interior of a bar, restaurant, department store et al. What do you guys use?
 
Illyad2, thank you for the question. I am also interested in learning more about this. Detailing the interiors of buildings sure adds realism to a scene, in my opinion.
 
I Google "pictures of xxxx" and then copy what I like to a folder. From there I paste to a blank Word document, size it to my needs and print. I use 65# paper for stiffness. Sizing them correctly takes some practice.
Here's an example of a quick search that I did for restaurant insides.
Restaurants.
 
Here's a couple of examples of ones that I did.
06-25-20 014.JPG

For this one, I found the left interior shot of a Chinese restaurant and used the computer to make a mirror image for the right side, scaled it and printed it.
Here's another using several shots for a bookstore.
06-25-20 020.JPG

And another for a Salvation Army Thrift Store.
06-25-20 016.JPG

Hope that this helps. I have many more if you need more examples.
 
Here's how I did the interiors for small structures on my N-scale layout.

First, I found photos (or illustrations) of appropriate interiors. This was very easily done with some Google searches. For the example below, I found this image of the interior of a quilt shop:

Quilt_Shoppe_interior_org.png


I re-sized and cropped the image to fit the structure and printed it on an inkjet printer. Then I mounted it in the structure as shown below:

Quilt_Shoppe_interior_1.png


The slight curve in the mounted image is intentional. According to some sources I consulted, the curve helps maintain a proper perspective when the interior is viewed from various angles. In practice, I'm not sure it makes any difference in a small N-scale structure. The image is backlighted with an LED, in this case using a Woodland Scenics "Just Plug" LED. I adjusted the brightness of the LED until the interior image looked good to me.

The finished structure looks like this in an "early evening" photo. Note the street light at left:

Quilt_Shoppe_interior_2.png


For a small structure like this one, it is not easy to see the details of the interior, nor does it really matter. All that's required is the suggestion of an interior.

- Jeff
 



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