Bit of a cop-out just repainting an old Airfix wagon... But I have a few of them and some looked quite presentable, which is why this has become the first official West Dorset wagon.
Painting was good fun- unfortunately I didn't take any pictures but hopefully I can explain what I did.
I started off by repainting the wagon in a mid brown, the paints I use are mostly from a large job lot of old Humbrol and Revell as personally I find the old formulae go on better and leave a better finish when brush painting. Anyway I think this was called Dark Earth.
Next I used fine sandpaper to create some graining on the plastic, giving subsequent dry brushing a key to adhere to.
I then dry brushed on a pale beige and a place grey with a stiff, round brush horizontally to create a basic wood grain effect, this is inside and out.
Next I covered the model in a German Grey wash which was allowed to stand for a while before being wiped off fairly vigorously. This has multiple effects, firstly tying in all the previous colours, secondly creating shadows whilst leaving it for a while means that streaks are created similar to wood graining.
After this is dry comes an interesting stage- a wet brush is used to apply fine table salt to various areas of the model- water should hold it in place. This is allowed to dry before grey primer is misted over, you may need two coats, I used this as the main body colour as it is about right for wagon grey. Mine was Simoniz but Halfords should be equally suitable. I then left this for around half an hour until it was touch dry.
Then I used a wet, soft brush to dissolve the salt, leaving interesting patterns of peeling paint with bare wood underneath but patterns that will look a bit coarse for OO, and not quite right for wood. So I then used varying grades of wet n dry to create different effects, using it gently to only expose the coat underneath and not the original colour, as well as create a wood grain texture. The back of a knife blade and a stiff brush were also used to access awkward areas around ironwork.
I probably should have done this earlier but I then applied some gloss varnish before applying the transfers kindly sent to me by James Hilton for the West Dorset and it's number.
A coat of matt varnish followed before a little bit of tinkering with the transfers to weather them down appropriately, using a knife blade and small amount of plastic solvent. Matte black was used to pick out the ironwork and paint the chassis before I coated the model in a black wash to tie everything together, wiping the majority of it off. For this, I wanted something that really 'stuck' in crevices so I used water and black weathering powder as this adheres superbly.
To finish, yellow and red weathering powders were combined to create a varied rust look brushed onto the ironwork and chassis with a large make up brush used to delicately apply an overall sooty black weathering powder over the whole model, and diluted PVA was used to fix some real coal dust into the corners of the wagon interior.
In conclusion, more could be done to the interior details, but this would be more work intensive than just building a kit so would be fairly pointless. I think it makes a decent "layout" model.
Painting was good fun- unfortunately I didn't take any pictures but hopefully I can explain what I did.
I started off by repainting the wagon in a mid brown, the paints I use are mostly from a large job lot of old Humbrol and Revell as personally I find the old formulae go on better and leave a better finish when brush painting. Anyway I think this was called Dark Earth.
Next I used fine sandpaper to create some graining on the plastic, giving subsequent dry brushing a key to adhere to.
I then dry brushed on a pale beige and a place grey with a stiff, round brush horizontally to create a basic wood grain effect, this is inside and out.
Next I covered the model in a German Grey wash which was allowed to stand for a while before being wiped off fairly vigorously. This has multiple effects, firstly tying in all the previous colours, secondly creating shadows whilst leaving it for a while means that streaks are created similar to wood graining.
After this is dry comes an interesting stage- a wet brush is used to apply fine table salt to various areas of the model- water should hold it in place. This is allowed to dry before grey primer is misted over, you may need two coats, I used this as the main body colour as it is about right for wagon grey. Mine was Simoniz but Halfords should be equally suitable. I then left this for around half an hour until it was touch dry.
Then I used a wet, soft brush to dissolve the salt, leaving interesting patterns of peeling paint with bare wood underneath but patterns that will look a bit coarse for OO, and not quite right for wood. So I then used varying grades of wet n dry to create different effects, using it gently to only expose the coat underneath and not the original colour, as well as create a wood grain texture. The back of a knife blade and a stiff brush were also used to access awkward areas around ironwork.
I probably should have done this earlier but I then applied some gloss varnish before applying the transfers kindly sent to me by James Hilton for the West Dorset and it's number.
A coat of matt varnish followed before a little bit of tinkering with the transfers to weather them down appropriately, using a knife blade and small amount of plastic solvent. Matte black was used to pick out the ironwork and paint the chassis before I coated the model in a black wash to tie everything together, wiping the majority of it off. For this, I wanted something that really 'stuck' in crevices so I used water and black weathering powder as this adheres superbly.
To finish, yellow and red weathering powders were combined to create a varied rust look brushed onto the ironwork and chassis with a large make up brush used to delicately apply an overall sooty black weathering powder over the whole model, and diluted PVA was used to fix some real coal dust into the corners of the wagon interior.
In conclusion, more could be done to the interior details, but this would be more work intensive than just building a kit so would be fairly pointless. I think it makes a decent "layout" model.
It would be cool to see a rake of these Harry. I'm planning on doing a more presentable rake of pre-grouping style wagons in WD livery.
ReplyDeleteYour first one certainly looked very nice, I think I'll be doing pretty much every wagon slightly differently- I've got a handful of GWR and SR vans which I expect will be kept fairly smart as well as some chassis I plan on scratchbuilding pre-grouping style wagons on, which will be in quite decrepit condition I expect. They're good fun to do in this sort of condition.
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