i have been building my fictitious layout for about a year and am now ready to paint my locos for my road. i would prefer to use water based paints sprayed with an airbrush. my scheme is a two tone. i want to use a yellow like that of the C&NW and a green like the one SOUTHERN used on their passenger cars. does anyone know what my best color choices would be for these two colors. also i am going to make my own decals for logos and lettering these locos. does anyone know i could approximate these colors using MS PAINT or GIMP? thanks in advance for the help.
Check the Polly Scale line of paint. I found a GN Big Sky Blue at my local hobby shop. It was pretty close to some passenger cars I have painted that way. I think I had to lighten it some for a really good match.
Walther’s reference book/catalog has the whole line listed. There is a CNW Yellow and a SOU Sylvan Green. I was misled by the page in the N-Scale book. It looked like it was Floquil which is a laquor but when I checked the part number it came up as Polly Scale which is waterbased.
The Walther’s numbers are 270-414191 CNW Yellow and 270-414374 SOU Sylvan Green.
The suggestion on paint colors choices is excellent but using your computer to try matching
them is far harder to do. You should try going to a Microscale letter and numbers set for a
simple ficticious road name.The Microscale on line catalogue even has small photos
of their sets in most cases.With the yellow and green colors suggested see what they
make with the Chicago and North Western sets.Maybe you can make it your own by calling
your line the Chicago and Western railroad! It’s fun to play it up that way.For engine modelling
check out rr-fallenflags.org website to see how the real railroads painted certain engines.
A set paint scheme on a road switcher maybe too complicated on a switch engine compared to
a F unit.
it’s going to be the forest valley and my paint scheme and colors are set. i was planning on spraying a scrap of styrene with the same colors and methods i’m using on the locos. then using my scanner to scan the styrene and using the eyedropper in GIMP to pull off the colors for my logo (already designed) and lettering. i realize the colors may not be an exact match but it should be close enough to not be smack in the face noticeable
Consider using plain old spray bombs. I paint most of my structures with cheap stuff from the big box rather than expensive hobby paint. I was able to match the colors the Rio Grande used pretty closely, enough to fool all but the most nitpicky of Rio Grande fanatics.
Now, the good stuff has it’s uses, along with the airbrush. But for lots of needs, if you can find something in a national brand that works well, you can usually count on finding it easily and at reasonable cost, then use it conveniently without the hassle of setting up and then cleaning the airbrush.
FWIW if I were starting over with a new free-lance road, I would select colors that are available in Tamiya spray cans. Unlike the older “paint bomb” spray cans, Tamiya cans have a very fine spray that works really well on models. Even when I’m going to airbrush a color, I normally use their primer gray spray first to get a nice even coat over the model.
The one downside is they are really military colors rather than railroad, but you can usually find a color very close to a railroad color.