Can anyone recommend a good paint color for modeling weathered wood that you would find on station platform decks or flat car surfaces? Thank you.
What a lot of builders of craftsman kits use is a wash of India ink & alcohol to achieve this effect.over the color you have pre painted the kit with. You only need something like a teaspoon to a quart of water though so go light. You may need to apply several light coats to get the effect your looking for. Remember you can always go with more coats to make it darker but you can’t lighten it up
Often the actual effect you are after on a station platform is not weathered painted wood but weathered wood where there is no remaining paint color (or it was never painted to begin with). The same india ink/90% alcohol mix can be used on bare wood - I tend to use a Qtip type swab (or one of those new mini applicators that are like very tiny Qtips), somewhat dried on a paper towel so it is almost like dry brushing. For a variety of reasons the less wet you get wood the better - never flood the wood.
Another varient is to forget washing or paint entirely. Charcoal (either an artist’s charcoal in stick form from an art supply store, or even a bit of charred wood from the fireplace) rubbed rather lightly with the grain on the wood, and then scrubbed in with an old toothbrush, can capture that silvery look of old unpainted wood. If you first roughen the texture a little by lightly scraping a fine Zona saw over the wood to give it a bit of grain that does a nice job of catching darker particles. In my experience there is no need to dullcoat or otherwise protect this darkened surface because the darkening is IN the wood, not ON the wood.
If you do want the look of weathered old painted wood, it is possible to hint at a paint color with colored chalks or pastels after the darkening effect mentioned above. Just a bit of barn red here or there rubbed in with that old toothbrush can suggest the effect. The primary virtue is that you have not gotten the wood damp at all.
Experiment first to get the hang of this.
Dave Nelson
I do the exact opposite to Dave, proving that there is no real correct way to do anything in this hobby[8D]
I like to build with strip wood and will immerse and soak my strip wood in different strengths of the alcohol and ink mix. This give a nice variation between different strips of wood. You need to let the wood dry to get the finished effect.
Anyone here use vinegar and steel wool?
All good suggestions. For a less weathered look, I will use the four earth colors in artist acrylics and mix washes right on a brush and paint the individual sticks one at a time. I change the mix a little, right on the brush, between each stick. The stregnth of the wash (water/paint mixture) varies along with the colors. Carelessness is the key ingrediant. The effect is a rather new work that was made out of boards from different species of trees, which was the norm back in the day.
For plastic, rough the surface up with a saw, coarse sandpaper or by scraping. Paint the surface a light base color, anything from white to grey to tan. Dry brush some greys, tans and browns on the surface. Darker colors for treated (creosoted) wood, lighter for untreated or sunbleached wood. Apply washes of dark greys, blacks, browns. Shoe/leather dye and India ink are good. Dry brush on some of paint color if the surface was painted. Hit that with a final wash and then use chalks or powders to make it look dusty if desired.
Hello I use chard wood and grind it up to a rough dust mix in some alcohol to so it looks like black water. Brush it on heavy and let it dry over night and brush off the bits of stuff and it should look like this.
the alcohol will loosen up the the glue so be careful. Hope this helps Frank