A great tutorial on painting a background for your layout, can be found at Dave Frary’s Trackside Scenery blog. Dave is an active professional  model railroad builder, photographer and instructor. His photos, plans and stories have appeared in Model Railroader, Railroad Model Craftsman and many other publications.

There was also an interesting quote in the article

… In the next few months I’ll be building a sugar train railroad based in the Caribbean. It’ll be on some fictional island surrounded by lush jungle with evidence of past volcanic activity …

Wow, that sounds interesting … I will be following his blog with a lot of interest the coming months!