I’m working on my second craftsman building kit, and I’d really like to recommend forgoing plastic for wooden structures (For brick, etc, plastic is right on) to everyone else who may be starting out from scratch.
I’ve been trying a number of different kits, and the wooden ones simply look so much better their plastic countrparts.
I’m currently constructing Crosby’s Coal.
and just love the way the wood takes the paint.
In contrast, I’ve been playing with some of the nice Walthers kits, such as Wally’s Warehouse, and trying to work on removing the plastic look with paint (on the left)
and while I’m not done with it, the craftsman kit almost seems less work over all to get much better results. I’m tempted to re-prime the Walther’s kits and start from scratch. I have a can of Citadel’s Roughcoat that would add some texture to it, but it might not be the right texture.
I’d rather not replace them at this juncture, so I was wondering if anyone has a good method to improve the look of plastic wood kits, other than simply not using them (which is what I’ll probably migrate to in the future - just scratchbuild or craftsman).
I agree with one proviso: that the grain in wood does not always scale down accurately – so that what in the prototype would be very smooth, if not shiny, wood, looks rough even if high quality milled wood is used. In that situation I think styrene can look acceptably real and in some ways more real than actual wood. One example would be the high gloss “varnish” wood passenger cars of the Pullman Palace car era. Another would be freshly painted wood structures. Fortunately around railroad areas not too many wood structures looked freshly painted or were painted with glossy paint.
I kinda agree and disagree. All said and done, the wood structures are easier to get to look good. The fact that the pieces are put together like a proto structure makes a big difference.
However, in a good plastic model, the detail can be far superior to a wood structure. Then it is up to you with a paint brush to bring out the detail and make it look real. In this case, you can get a really nice looking plastic sturcture.
@dknelson. Agreed. For fresh paint, you have a good point.
@spacemouse. Thanks for you’re input, but thats basically a stone building, and as I noted, I’m talking about plastic models of wooden structures. I am satisfied with my brick DPM models, the texture and color seems right. It’s the wooden clapboard sided ones that I’m not satisfied with. Were I doing a modern era and the building was sided with aluminum or vinyl, than the plastic might be more appealing.
Painting is the key. I use a VERY small brush and many variations of the color. If staining, try to brush each board indepentently with a slight variation in color. I use artist acrylics in a tube and put the base color on the palet and then the earth colors around. Each time I get paint on the brush I change the mix a little. For a painted surface, its in the weathering and again the same variation is the key, whether you use more paint or the weathering chalk. Very slight differences make a big difference. On a p[ainted building streaking is important unless you are modeling a building painted sice the last rain. I have steaked with acrylics and chaulk and see little difference.
In all, practice and expermentation is more important than advice and instruction.
And remember, unless you are an artist, you can only get good at it, only the artists get great.
Except for wooden structures, such as barns and sheds, that were built with rough (unplaned) lumber and were unpainted, plastic, properly painted, does a good job of replicating the prototype. A well-maintained and painted wooden structure has no visible wood grain, nail holes, knotholes, or splits. In my opinion, properly prepared styrene does a better job of representing wood than does real wood, and this goes for structures that are meant to represent rough and/or unpainted wood, too. Check out Harold’s work HERE . I’m working through the stocks of scale lumber that I have on hand for non-critical projects, such as spare tie piles, dunnage and load bracing and lumber loads, but even these require painting to look realistic. Plastic is faster to assemble, more dimensionally uniform and stable, and less susceptible to humidity.
Not the clearest of pictures, but peeling paint, split boards, and nail holes are as easy to do on styrene as on wood, and you can easily alter the “woodgrain” or the ability of “boards”, when abutting one another, to take paint, something only possible with real wood when doing board-by-board construction.
Scarpia,I fully agree with you and anyone that has followed my recent threads will know that I prefer wood. All the materials have their place, that is for sure.
If I wanted to be nasty, I would say that to make an inexpensive plastic kit look like a costly craftsman kit, you should just turn over all the prototype photos, weather everything to the point of half-rotten decrepitude (on a structure that apparently sells boxcarloads of merchandise), and add lots of gewgaws, furbelows, and soda-pop signs. Some random stonemasonry in odd locations, preferably combined with brickwork, is good too. But I don’t want to be nasty and so I won’t.
(And of course not every costly craftsman kit is like that, and many of the cheaper ones are actually quite acceptable, and once in a blue moon I have indeed seen a building in that shocking state. Weasel weaselly weasel out.)
Wood does have a strange, undefinable pleasantness to it, somehow. Maybe it’s just ingrained into the psyche. After all, the cavemen didn’t have many plastic kits (I think they had Globe freight cars and Lindberg 1:32 autos. You know, the ones with the molded plastic wheel-tire halves that you had to paint).
I guess, maybe, we can get too caught up in advantages or disadvantages, and forget that a lot of it comes down to personal preference.
That is a fair enough statement. My purpose was not to disregard plastic, per say, but more as how can you get the wood siding kind of look on the plastic. I think you can overkill the beaten down look on structures, but to me it’s the texture difference that stands out.
I’m interested in how to improve my plastic buildings, and it sounds like I’ll need to sit down and work on my painting skills to get the kind of look (aged, textured, but not abused) that I’m looking for.
One thing that I’m still wondering about vs the prototype is paint. Modern paints (presumely) seal and coat better than their counterparts in the first part of the 20th Century. Is it my impression that this is why the wooden ki
Some of the old paint, on fences etc., might have been whitewash, which is basically a thin plaster of lime and water. This was often used inside barns. Whitewash has little or no gloss. But the oil-based paints and stains used on reasonably civilized structures were quite durable. Lead paint actually worked really well! If you look at a photo of an old building, on the rare occasion that you find one that really shows the surface texture well, you can see that the paint looks very good. But we are now used to seeing these structures after 50 - 100 years of painting, chipping, repainting, and grain raising when the wood gets wet. Old dry wood soaks up paint more, and old paint collects atmospheric dust and loses its gloss due to weathering. So the funny thing is: if you build a model of a 1920 structure for your 1930 layout, and paint it the way it probably looked, it might end up looking too new.
I’ve always gotten pretty good results by distressing the plastic parts that are supposed to represent wood using sandpaper, emery boards, razor saws and wire brushes. Plastic structures are usually easier to assemble than wood structures since plastic glues set so much faster (aside from using CA on wood) and the parts generally fit without a lot of fuss.
One thing to remember is the scale of the wood grain. Except for the overly exaggerated wood grain seen on today’s simulated wood building products (such as siding or wood grain embossed doors), natural wood grain would likely be too small to be seen in smaller scales (HO, N, Z). If you look at an old house, the edges of peeling paint tend to stand out far more than the wood grain of the exposed wood. For this reason, I think some light distressing of plastic parts can give a more realistic representation of scale size wood than does real wood.
Other “Craftsman” weathering techniques I generally don’t like are adding butt joints in wood siding and nail holes. Having a bit of construction experience, I always chuckle when I see a model structure with butt joints floating between studs and rows of nail holes where studs would not be located on a real structure. Real wall studs are located immediately to either side of every window and door and at the corners of the building, regardless of the stud spacing. Studs are generally spaced at 16 or 24 inches on center but can be spaced closer should a door or window not line up with the planned spacing. No self respecting painter would ever leave nail holes unfilled before painting and a nail hole visible in HO scale would be around 2 inches in diameter on the prototype. Properly located butt joints are OK, but I just don’t like the nail hole technique.
If you really want to learn technique, buy a couple of CDs from Miicro Mark. I have “weathering structures” and another one on painting structures. They are short and pricey but I learned a whale of a lot from them.
I’m firmly in the plastic camp. My layout requires numerous wooden buildings, and so far all of them have been made of styrene.
I did try making a station building out of scale lumber, but I was very disappointed with the results. The wood grain was way overscale, and gave the building a really coarse, toy-like look. So I chucked the thing.
That fuzzy photo that I posted earlier has been bugging me, so I shot a few slightly better ones, using my Opti-Visor to get a clearer close-up. The structure is intended for an as-yet-unbuilt area of the layout, and there’ll be a built-up earthen ramp for trucks and wagons using the dump shelter.
The foundation is from an old Model Die Casting 3-in-1 kit, with Tichy windows. The siding is Evergreen sheet clapboard, with bits of Evergreen corrugated siding for the gable ends, and the roof of the lean-to is Campbell metal siding. The main sub-roof is .060" sheet styrene, with Campbell shingles applied using contact cement. The lean-to is done “board-on-board” over a built-up styrene strip frame, and the “wooden” roof trusses were also done with suitably-sized styrene “lumber”.
The building is meant to represent the storage bins of a former coal dealer. The elevator was moved from its trackside location to the road side, and the structure is now used only for storage of grain. After distressing the “boards”, the structure got a coat of Floquil grey primer, followed by, on all but the “rebuilt” areas, a coat of dark green. When this was dry, the entire structure was airbrushed with a red oxide. (The “wooden” part of the building lifts off the foundation, making for easy painting.) When all
