This past Saturday afternoon marked my first-ever attempt at weathering rolling stock (or anything, for that matter). Began weathering some pieces from Bachman “Empire Builder” set to learn on. Nothing has any matte/flat on it yet, per my “hair spray” thread. Before picture. This should be a pretty familiar piece: First attempt. All chalk applied dry: Liked the amount of fade there, but didn’t like it up close, as all of the chalk was getting between boards, and very little on the board faces. Figured a wet application technique would work better, so this is chalk applied by dipping the brush into 70% isopropyl alcohol, and swabbing it into the chalk first: Mud splatter layer applied dry. The rusting on the trucks is artist oils, about a 3:1 raw Sienna/Raw Umber mix. I rather like it, and figure to clear coat it to preserve “my first weathered car.”
Next was a gondola. Gondolas live some pretty hard lives, and can become real rustbuckets. For the above wood box car, I had to worry primarily about fading the paint. This called for a different technique. The before: That’s “not quite as before as I wanted it,” I started it then realized I wanted a before picture, so I cleaned the artist oil paint off the best I could. I did one side like this, just Raw Umber for the rust wiped it all over, then wiped it off to leave what you see: Did the other side a little different, using Raw Sienna at first. Felt that was too orange overall, so then brushed in some raw umber, brushed on a couple of rusty scars: A close-up on the trucks. Again, no flatcoat, just artist oils, leaving plenty of sheen: Anyway, thoughts on both cars are welcome.
Ok, it was warm enough today for me to lift my garage door and take both cars out for spraying with Testors clear flat lacquer. No apparent difficulties with the hair spray, and no gloss or sheen on either car. I’m very pleased. Hope to get a few pictures later.
Ok, some pictures: This is actually the opposite side of the car from the earlier photos. Can’t see the reduced sheen in the photo, but the flat coat did result in the mud splash on the low part of the body to be more prominent. The gondola. In this woo woo woo, you can compare to the shot in one of my above posts, and see that the clear flat dud irs job of redycing the sheen: The non-weathered interior seemed out of place, so I took it on: Too dark and indistinguishable from the coal load. Tried to spice it up with some orange dust from the pastel chalks: It came out pretty good on the gondola sills, where the artist oil was laid down yesterday. It had just enough tack to pull the chalk from my brush tip. I could then spread it around a bit. Inside the bin, the oil was too new yet, and I couldn’t work the chalk in with it well. I may well clear coat it as it is, because I don't plan to remove the gondola’s coal load. Working ahead on a cattle car and a boxcar. I think my next twist will be to use alcohol and water & chalk to weather the trucks. Hope to preserve more details that way.
Ok, so I guess I’m four days in at this point. I worked up a coal hopper. I knew a brown hopper would be a challenge to give a good rusty appearance. This one lived up to it. This was my third attempt at trying to get some rust to show on the exterior: I know rust on vertical surfaces tends toward dark, but my efforts at a good dark rust all blended in with the base brown after applying the flat coat. For my first attempt, I mixed together some red, black and brown chalk that made for really deep maroon coverage. But after the flat coat, you couldn’t see where I even applied it. In the end, I went for an orange-ish rust. Four coats of clear flat in the end, and I didn’t want to smooth over any more detail. This hopper has no load, so I took on the bin interior faces: I painted the interior with Raw Sienna artist oil, laid it on fairly thick. After two days, the surface was still rather tacky, so I laid down a generous amount of my bright orange pastel chalk. With the bay interior getting abraded by the coal loading/unloading process every run, it seemed reasonable that the rust would be frequently abraded away, and that it was possible that the rust would often be found in a fresh orange state. This hopper also had mud splash applied, fairly vivid, but nicely blended, before spraying the clear coat, After the clearcoat, it went into hiding like my first rust layers.
I’ll probably brush a tiny amount of brown over the white I applied for showing the running of old paint dust. I put it on a bit vivid, expecting the same muting of color that happened with my rust, but it retained its brightness.
Upon further consideration, I’m going to leave the paint deterioration “bleed area” alone. The above photo was taken with a very bright light pointed at the hopper, and contrast was magnified as a result. I looked at the car this evening on the layout, and withiut tgat bright light, the contrast was mych more tame. I took this picture last night with normal ambient lighting on my layout: In my layout’s normal lighting, the bleed area contrast looks a lot more like in this woo woo woo.
