For Christmas my lovely wife got me this Vallejo Old & New Wood Effects.
I can no longer find the video but I got turned on to this through a video that showed turning styrene into realistic weathered wood. Enter this flat car:
This is a simple Bachmann 50′ flat car that I’ve had a while. Originally I had repainted it and tried to do a PGR paint scheme and it turned out pretty decent but I never liked the texture of the paint I brushed on. It’s been sitting in my project drawer for quite a while at it was time to do something. Luckily the “wood” platform is removable so I can paint it separately while I decided how to strip and paint the bottom.
The following steps are all in the in the instructions that come with the kit and are by no means complete, just quick summaries of each step. For this flat car I’ve gone with the old wood look. I should find another flat car and do the newer wood look for contrast sometime.
First off is to apply a wood colored primer, for this we are using Surface Primer 70.614. This is IDF Israeli Sand Grey… primer version. There is a regular paint one as well a fact I almost missed. It’s worth noting that the instructions call for airbrushing this on but as I was having troubles with my airbrush at the time I ended up brushing it on to a pretty good effect.
After allowing things to dry we apply a base wood color… which ironically is Concrete 71.131. With these pictures it’s kind of hard to tell the difference between the two which I attribute to the lighting and my phone camera. At this point it’s kind of caught me off guard how much a color like Concrete kind of looks like old wood.
Next up is highlighting random boards for variation which can use a variatey of colors, I used Light Brown 71.927 and IDF Sand Gray 71.141. The idea here is to mix in newer or more of a color variety for the boards. As it was cold out and I didn’t want to delay the project by waiting till I could use my airbrush I dove in with a small brush. I wasn’t terribly happy with the result so I used a paper towel to wipe off excess paint and try to blend the are in. It didn’t work terribly well but afterwards didn’t look too bad either. I wish had stuck to it for reasons I’ll explain in a bit.
The next step was to start getting to the more detailed work by highlighting the edges and raised grains of the boards wiht IDF Sand Grey 71.141 (not the primer). I jumped into this straight from the previous step as I wasn’t liking the result and I had IDF Sand Grey out and was already working with it. The instructions listed a couple ways to achieve this but they for the most part worn’t working so I was using a paper towl to wipe off excess.
At this point I’m getting pretty happy and wondering if I should just call it done, but I’m glad I didn’t. After highlighting the edges it’s time to highlight the lows with a sparingly applied dark wash. Watching this work kind of blew my mind, the kit comes with Dark Grey Wash 517 which is already super thin, and then you dilute it with water 50/50. It was amazing watching it find lows and spread out. The area around my attempted lighter boards was the biggest difference and it was clear I could have used the wash to cleanup some of my concerns. Again here I’m thinking I could probably stop and be happy, but I’m going to go a little bit further.
Now it’s back to highlighting random raised areas with a lighter color, this time RAL1001 Elfenbein (don’t ask me what that means.. ok curiosity go the better of me, it’s evidently German for Ivory) 71.075. For some reason I was having trouble getting the effect described in the instructions so I ended up abandoning the attempt and using some of the black wash to blend in what I’d already done. I’ll need to spend some time trying to figure out how to do the grain highlight sometime but I’m going to call this particular project done.
As you may have noticed this transitioned from being a single flat car to being two, one as a refresher is my first kitbash turning a regular Bachmann flat car into a custom DM&IR pulpwood car.
Photo credits on the last three photos to my lovely wife
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