I’ve finally broken lurker cover to say you’ve done some very nice work indeed here. As you’ve no doubt discovered it’s a fine line between not enough & too much. Although maybe there’s more leeway than we think, given that in any line of rolling stock we’d see quite a wide spectrum of weathering, so it would be more unrealistic if they were all weathered the same.
I’m a broken record singing the praises of the other handy weathering medium – pastel chalks. Scrape a fine powder off sticks of various light brown shades & use a soft brush to dab it on to taste.
Hi Dioramartin…
Thanks…how durable are chalks? I haven’t used them before…
I’ve used loose pigments on armour and unless they are sealed or fixed they tend to come off with handling…or the inevitable dusting when you don’t have a display case
I think freight cars can be really weathered to the max if one likes that look as there are a lot of extreme weathered cars out there. Unless you are tied to specific prototype modelling there is a lot of room to just experiment. To me, dirty cars look better than clean ones rolling along the track…how dirty is the rub.
Multiple projects on the go last couple of days…
Took a newer Athearn GWS gondola and a very thinned white Tamiya white fade coat…
Then I tried 2 layers of W+N oils with blue white grey and then browns umbers and black …
Then Tamiya grime coat…
Sealed at different times during the process with Krylon flat and Tamiya XF-86
Dave pastel dust’s surprisingly tenacious even on semi-glossy surfaces, and almost impossible to remove accidentally if the surface has been very, very, very lightly sanded first (800 or 1000 grade). A light flat/matt lacquer spray on top should remove any fear of fingerprints although I’ve never found it necessary because, typically, the dust goes into/onto places fingers don’t usually go. On the other hand it’s easy to intentionally reduce with a stiff brush/toothbrush or remove altogether with a wet one.
Apart from looking realistic I like it because it’s a dry process and you’ve got to try incredibly hard to screw it up, and even then it’s easily reversible. My experience with weathering media is that the degree of difficulty rises sharply with the amount of fluid involved
A tale of two box cars… these started out the same shade of blue…
The Great Northern got a heavy coat of X-20A with a couple drops of Tamiya White as a base coat
I’ve been spending modelling time on multiple projects…which means nothing ever gets finished, but Sunday night I pulled another gondola out and started weathering it…
Would you be interested in posting a how-to, say 4-6 pix from the prepped unweathered model, through your mixing/adding/finishing a model with your oils? I suspect it would be very welcomed by many of us.
