So I’m at the big box home improvement center (the orange one, not the blue one) with my wife who has dragged me out to “look at colors” for the dining room… I remind her of our deal that I have total exclusive control of the garage and basement in return for letting her have the rest of the place, so why do I have to be involved? Yeah, that worked about as well as you think it did.
Anyway, she’s wanting to paint the walls of our dining room in a brown “suede texture” effect. Made by (drum roll) Ralph Lauren. She wants freaking “Polo” brand paint? You gotta be kidding me.
Then a funny thing happens. I’m looking at the sample swatch of this brown ‘suede’ paint, and thinking it looks an awful lot like the baseball diamond dirt areas my buddy Pete spent countless hours getting “just so.” Not too smooth, not too rough, etc.
So now I’m thinking this stuff might be a dead-easy way to get good base cover “dirt.” My wife ends up with a couple gallons of moss green for the dining room, and I take home a gallon of the Polo brown suede stuff.
Long story short, I just finished covering the “pink prairie” earlier tonight and this stuff is, in my opinion, just spot on. It has a vaguely ‘fuzzy’ effect that is right in that magic zone of not being “brown flat paint” but not being really “textured” per se. It’s visually just past the submliminal. Great effect for almost no effort.
Now of course, instead of the pink prairie I have the endless fields of mud, so I’m eager to start playing with various ground covers over my “dirt”… But so far I definitely suggest this stuff as worth a shot.
I must admit when I first saw Ralph Lauren paint at the Home Depot, that was a ‘Huh’ moment for me, followed by a ‘What will they brand-market next…’ thought.
Any chance of images of this name-brand ‘dirt’ ground cover in situ?
Sure. Too busy building this weekend to take pics, but will grab some tomorrow.
I’m a painter and the Ralph Lauren paint is great. And I’ve got a gallon of olive green/brown in suede finish that I use dirt, dead grass, etc. I’m glad someone else has discovered this stuff. It’s got a great flat finish and just a slight bit of texture. Always thought it would be great for n scale grass, dirt, whatever as the ground foam always looks to course in n. And sometimes you can find misstints for cheap at the Depot.
I used the Ralph Lauren paints a few years ago. We renovated one of our extra bedrooms turning it into an office and we used two colors of the designer paint, one was a grey granite color for the ceiling and the other was a blue suede color for the walls. The texture of the paint is gained from having fine sand particles mixed in with it. The blue suede paint was fantastic, and it gave the room a different feel, it really looked like and felt like suede cloth. Everyone who viewed the room was blown away with the paint scheme, and were always running their fingers on the wall.
I thought of using the same paint on the layout too, and at $30.00 or so per gallon this stuff is not cheap. I have not tried it yet, but I read in Dave Frary’s scenery book that you can add a variety of textures to thined out paint and I image that it might get similar results as the Ralph Lauren paints.
There are plenty of brands of “designer paint” at any home improvement store, and getting custom blends is a great way to cover your scenery. Even a quart goes a long way. I have used custom tints a couple of times: once for a non-operating diorama set in the Sierra Nevadas, and once for a sky-blue tint for backdrops. In both cases I took photos of what I wanted (dirt in the Sierras and a sky shot) and brought the photo to the store, and used their sample swatches to find a suitable match. The soil of the Sierras has a distinct reddish tint that is not close to the traditional idea (“brown = dirt”) so having a wide variety of paint colors was a real plus. One could also get several similar tints in order to break things up visually, or use a slightly lighter tint for background scenes to increase the illusion of distance (air in between you and a distant object makes the object look paler.)
The scenery here is Sculptamold and plaster castings over Styrofoam, with custom-mixed interior latex paint. I applied ink washes to much of the cliff faces, then drybrushed more of the latex paint over the foreground rocks to increase apparent depth. The farthest points back were left a lighter color. The scene in this photo is 2x2x2 feet in HO scale. A bit of the Styrofoam can be seen on the lower edges.