I have an older BM boxcar kit the blue seems to be way too dark how can I lighten the blue?
[#welcome]
Get Brighter Lights in your Room.
The color of equipment is a detail to most modelers, but not to me. Colors fade, they get dirty, they come from different batches.
Besides that, my father was a painter, and he liked to have a lot of light on his easal. Unfortunately, many of his paintings came out way too dark. They need to be viewed under the same light that they were painted under to make them look correct.
Now as for changing what you have, you might try a thin white wash to simulate fading. Or else you just repaint the whole model with the color that you do want.
Some people try to remove paint before adding new coats, the LION has painted one color on top of another many times. Come cars were delivered in Green, I painted them brown, but now they are gray.
ROAR
I find that a simple coat of Testor’s DullCote can either lighten the color slightly or give that impression.
After the DullCote is applied, LION mentions a thin wash (a method also used to lighten the color of bricks in model structures). You might want to try an application of white or light gray chalks or powders, applied to the car using a small cosmetic type sponge, also secured with DullCote (but there has to be a coat of DullCote first as well).
The next step is very risky, and follows a weathering article by John Feraca in the March 2016 issue of the NMRA Magazine: Brush a coat of 50% or 70% isopropyl alcohol on the sides and ends. This can leave a sort of chalky deposit that lightens the color, often quite a bit, and which can sometimes partly be brushed off if it is too much. BUT (a big but) that same alcohol is an excellent paint remover. Never rub the surface when the alcohol is wet unless you want to remove paint or lettering or both. That is a technique that personally I practiced on some junker cars bought for a buck or two at a swap meet before I tried it on a car I liked. The results are not easy to control or to predict. When it works it is surprisingly effective.
Dave Nelson
Hello all,
What are you comparing it too???
Conrail blue and Santa Fe blue are indeed different “colors” of blue.
An oxidized paint of the same makeup will look “different” than a fresh coat.
Oxidation tends to “lighten” the color as we perceive it, given the same lighting conditions: daylight (5,500 k), fluorescent (5,000 k) or tungsten (3,200 k).
Comercial batches of paint, from year to year, batch to batch, will also have variations unless closely matched by the paint manufacturer.
This is why home improvement centers have adopted an optical color matching system.
Most prototypical railroads aren’t too concerned with matching paint EXACTLY.
If one color is so “off” that it is no where near the railroads trademarked colors then it is repainted with the “proper” color.
You can “lighten” (tint) dark colors (shades) by spraying a mist of Titanium White.
If this in not to your preferance try weathering the car.
This is a plausible paint scenario because this will alter the cars color in a plausible way. Darker for newer paint and lighter for older more oxidized.
Either way, “Beauty (or color) is in the eye of the beholder.”
If you need an “exact” paint match you can go to your home improvement center and have them scan the original and give you a paint matching reading; either in RGB or CMYK.
From there you can take these values to a custom model paint manufacturer. Tell them the system; RGB or CMYK and the values, then have them produce and “exact” match to your preferences.
Hope this helps.
OK, well, to keep it simple, something you can do, as Dave and Lion suggest, and what Cody has shown in his weathering/fading videos, a thinned white wash will do the trick. I use an air brush, and apply light coats, until I have the desired effect.
I tried the brush-on, and it’s a bit tricky, you might want to “practice” on a “train set” car that is expendable. I ended up removing it, with alcohol, and using my airbrush. I like the formula of white, mixed with alcohol and distilled water, as much as 50/50%.
Mike.
Not offering any solutions, paint remover or otherwise.
LION hit the basic problem. You are looking at paint that was probably right for freshly painted BM cars in full sunlight. If you light your layout to a similar level, even with flourescents, you’ll have an electric bill (for AC) like the national debt of Chad. (And no need of additional cold-weather heating.) Not to mention that that UV-loaded light level would lighten the paint in a hurry!
The same problem occurs in reverse when a modeler upgrades the lighting as a final step in layout construction. Suddenly all those dark colors are much lighter, and that white-weathered thing looks like it was whitewashed.
I have a similar situation. The far ends of my cul-de-sac aisleways are rather dimly lighted, and the outer peninsula bases are downright dark. The Tomikawa area (and adjacent peninsula ends) get much more light. I just pretend there’s a thunderstorm up the valley…
Chuck (Modeling Central Japan in September, 1964 - with accidental lighting effects)