Now that my Walthers ADM elevator has arrived (after almost 2 weeks shipping time from Milwaukee to West Michigan) I would like to make it look like old white paint flaking off of concrete. I don’t have an air brush.
I’m thinking light grey primer with a light overspray of flat white, then a little wire brushing. Other suggestions on how to make this look old and weatherworn?
This structure is going next to the Mississippi river. I think I’ll show scum on the bottom 10 - 15 feet, with a distinct high water mark (I saw this in Alton, Il after the big '73 and '93 floods).
Painting / weathering suggestions and pictures would be appreciated!
Ya know, I could be way off but, from the grain elevators I saw in California (which has a suprising amount of same), they were all natural concrete except for things like painted logos. I’m thinking you could start with a spray of Floquil Concrete and then dry brush on Aged Concrete and grime along with some weathering powders until it looked right. Concrete elevators and silos were always poured in lifts of about 20 feet so make sure you weather in a darker, almost rust color ring about every 20 feet to simulate the lift lines.
I am sure that this will sound almost as weird as my suggestion/advocacy as cigarette ashes as a weathering medium.
One thing I have used to restrict the adherence of paint to a structure is, of all things, petroleum jelly i.e. Vaseline®; using a (relatively) wide brush pick up a little petroleum jelly on the tip of the brush and then stroke it downward onto the structure - LIGHT IS THE WORD HERE; you are not interested in putting a coating of petroleum jelly on the whole structure, only at places where you do not want paint to adhere. Overspray this with your ‘paint’ coat; when you are done wash off the structure with WARM water and dish soap to get rid of the vaseline®. If you have done this correctly it will look like paint that has flaked off leaving ‘unpainted concrete’ visible.
Concrete seems to be very rarely grey… cue for a xillion posts with pics of grey concrete.
Concrete also seems to vary a huge amount by whn it was poured… especially shuttered concrete. More modern stuff seems to be increasingly smooth… presumiably because people learnt the hard way that the more “pores” there are in the surface the more dust can get in and then you start to get moss. ivy and even plants right up to and including trees starting.
I guess that to a germinating tree seed a minute crack in a concrete elevator is just a different sort of rock cliff. The more “open”/“porous” the concrete the easier it will be for the plant to push its roots in and extract whatever nutrition and water are in there.
I’ve seen plenty of big concrete structures (and even more masonry ones) with small bushes and trees sprouting from them… but rarely seen it modelled.
It occurs to me that where there is grain there will be birds… so there will be fertiliser and a transporting agent (other than the wind) to shift seeds up the sides of the elevators (or whatever).
Until the really modern stuff poured concrete frequently has the marks of the shuttering ply (or whatever)… at least in 8x4 panels and sometimes right down to a “grain” from the surface of the wood… I would not try to replicate a 3d grain but it does make for very distinct patterning in the way dust/dirt changes the colour of the whole surface - I think that this is why mono-coloured elevators (etc) always look toy like.
The clever thing that I would like an answer to is how to paint this very delicate pattern of lines horizontally around the elevator tower. (The grain seems to be most often horizontal). For the rippled effect of tamped concrete - as in a parking lot - I use an artists comb [cut] brush to sweep across each laid panel of concrete in parralel lines. This is for a much heavier effect than would occur wi
Any kind of grit/dust is good so long as it isn’t toxic/carcenogenic and doesn’t degrade whatever it is put on.
Back in the day our next door neighbour chain smoked from sun-up to bedtime… my first ash pits were definitley filled with real ash. [:O]
Another good masking material (test in an out of sight place forst) is latex glue or paint. Personally I prefer this to vaseline (not a registered trade mark here) as it’s much easier to see nad can be peeled off with a finger nail / tweezers or a scalpel. The trouble with it can be that it will take what it was marking with it - usuyally if it is left too long and has cured.
I’m sure that flakey paint and rust have been covered in boxcar/gon weathering threads and on weathering forums. Any links please anyone?
Two weeks shipping from Milwaukee to west Michigan? Did they have some one swim across lake Michigan to get it to you? [:)] I’ve never personally tried this, but could you use crackle paint? I’ve seen this stuff in spray cans and in a two part brush application. The spray can would probably be overkill. With the brush application, you apply the base coat and then an activater of sorts. You could then pinpoint where you want a crackled, peeling surface. Just and idea.
I have seen white painted concrete grain silos, none were not completely white anymore! Similar to R. T. Poteet’s method is the rubber cement method. Replace his vasoline with rubber cement, one the white paint has dried, use an eraser to go over the structure, the areas where the rubber cement is located will peel off. However, R. T.'s method sounds easier. I would caution against the wire wheel method you decribed, might take too much off and go into the bare plastic. Then again, some sort of non wire (nylon?) material may work just fine.
The idea of the high water mark sound very nice and helps lend some history to the elevator.
I might add a faint third color here and/or there.
I made realiztic cast concrete tombstones from cardboard many years ago for a haunted house, I oversprayed with an off white, then oversprayed with a med grey, and purposely did not go for compleat coverage so that brown of the cardboard faintly showed hear and there under the white, while the grey only lightly applied at parts, where it looked like the concrete had stayed wetter longer - areas near down spouts or on the wall where on your grain elevator or
A spot that had water collects or dripping on the walls, in the sun might actualy have a bairly perceptable brown or green tint if algae has started growing on the concrete - a very dilute wash in that paticular area might work for this.
A corner near a high traffic area, might actualy be missing a chunk of concrete and have rebar sticking out while it awaits repair, in which case the concrete will be light grey and rough.