What do you use if you want an old abandoned barn or something like that with the gray weathererd wood look? I’m thinking India ink solution or gray stain? Any other approaches that work well?
Thanks in advance
There are classic ways to get a ‘pickled wood’ finish – some are chemically dangerous if not done correctly, including the use of oxalic acid as wood bleach. Sheldon (ATLANTIC CENTRAL) may have up-to-date approaches.
I cheated and used gray stain and wash, brushing lengthwise to get different colors for the ‘boards’ and other pieces. Don’t forget warpage, rot spots, rust streaks from nails or fittings, mold under the eaves, etc. which I did as largely overpainted weathering effects.
There are good weathering techniques for these sorts of effects through the P:48 modelers group – now on groups.io – and some of their other work is a source of inspiration and joy.
The classic is alcohol and shoe dye solution. There are many variations on this technique. Here is from a post I made somewhere on the forum in the past:
More tips on working with wood:
Wood: Use fine grained basswood, many kits of old days use big grain pine. This looks bad when stained as the grain is grossly out of scale. Balsa can have the same issues. Northeastern scale and Kappler are two good suppliers. Think in terms of scale dimensions when using wood I.e. 2 X12s for planking, 2 x 4 studs, 4 x 4 posts etc. If you plan to do lots of wood construction, buy an NWSL chopper – one of my most used tools. Tasks like cutting out 150 identical size planks are a piece of cake with this tool.
Cut wood before gluing as mentioned above. Assemble before staining and you run the risk of the glue not absorbing the stain and you will have paint or resort to other methods to cover up bare spots – best to avoid if you can.
Alcohol shoe dye solutions: India Ink gives a slight blue cast to the stained wood, Kiwi shoe dye is more charcoal black, Lincoln dye is nasty but is very potent and gives a very dark jet black. Some modeler’s prefer premixed products such as driftwood stain or Silverwood stain. Micro mark’s sells a premixed shoe dye solution and another option is a product called weather it. All these methods and mixes work well, all have a different look…Refresh the dye in the bottle every so often.
Staining Process: Dyeing wood is messy and the dye solution is nuclear. It will ruin surf
Check out rustystumps.com, on the bottom right of their homepage is ‘how to articles’ lot of good info on staining & inking wood.
Regard, Peter
I use various washes made from watered-down acrylic paint. Raw umber, dark gray, and light gray are most common.
Dissolve a ball of #0000 steel wool in a small jar of white vinegar. The two react and form iron acetate, which when brushed or dipped lends a beautiful grey weathered look to wood. I’ve used it all over my small layout-- you can augment the effect and get different tones by pre-treating the wood with over-steeped black tea (I forget the science, but the tannins do something to accelerate the effect of the iron acetate on the wood.)
Phil
I like Minwax Driftwwod stain thinned down.
oldline1
Hunterline wood stains. https://hunterline.com
Would artist chalk work that’s adhered with dulcoate??
I’d build it in styrene, and then paint and weather it to look like old weathered wood.
Faster to assemble than wood, and less likely to fall apart in a couple of years.
Think of it as an alternative solution.
Wayne
Plastic certainly has the virtue that liquid washes and other liquid treatments won’t warp it. For flatcar decks I rattle can spray first a tan, then a gray, then I attack the plastic deck with the tang end of a file as per a Matt Snell article (I also use a drywall screw) which wears down the gray so just a hint of the tan shows, meaning just a hint of bare wood, and then I spray india ink and alcohol to lighten the gray and give it that vague silvery look that driftwood and old wood decks get.
My “Frugal Modeler” article in the Midwest Region’s Waybill can be found here
http://www.mwr-nmra.org/mwr2016/mwr-images/waybillfiles/waybill2017spring.pdf
For actual wood, I have had success using ash and bits of charred wood from the fireplace (but charcoal sticks from an art supply store would work too) and rub the wood with it. The darkness really gets into the grain and securing it with DullCote does NOT remove the stain as it can with powders on plastic.
Again the Frugal Modeler article I wrote on this can be found here:
http://www.mwr-nmra.org/region/waybill/waybill20102summer.pdf
Dave Nelson