Barrel & Marble Works: Painting and Finishing

This last phase of construction has been about painting and detailing.

I was complaining in the first Boneyard post about all the paints Airfix recommended - 15 in total - that one can use to paint the European Ruined Workshop. Turns out I’ve used a lot myself to paint the Barrel & Marble works: 13 if I’ve accounted correctly. Looks like I don’t pay attention to my own grumblings 

All walls that were paneled with corrugated metal sheets were base coated with a thinned wash of Tamiya Neutral Grey. The wash was created by mixing the gray paint with Testors Universal Acrylic Thinner on my palette. I also dunk the brush I’m using to mix and apply the paint into some old, sludgy water I’ve used for brush cleaning to add some additional grot to the mix.

You may have noticed in some earlier photos that there were blue lines on a number of panels. I used a blue gel pen to mark up the panels prior to cutting, and I thought the base coat of paint would hide them. I was wrong. But, something interesting did happen that I hadn’t planned on. The stuff I used to thin the wash caused the blue ink to run a bit, and a little judicious scrubbing with the brush blended everything into a nice patina – well, I’m kinda partial to it anyway.

The recyclery was base coated with Tamiya Gray Green paint straight from the bottle.

{Mixing the rust coloured paint on the palette.}

I then went to work ‘rusting‘ the roof on the Barrel & Marble Works. Rust coloured paint was mixed on my palette using Testors Model Master Acryl Rust and Tamiya Deep Green with some Testers thinner thrown in. Gradually mix small amounts of the green into the rust paint until the rust paint loses its glossiness. Even when it reaches this state, I don’t like to make the mix too uniform. I like there still to be hints of loosely mixed green still visible because I like the way it looks on the model – you’ll see some green, but not large patches, just highlights here and there. The prototype has a thoroughly rusted roof; my model doesn’t replicate that intensity of redness.

{Another session of mixing the rust paint}

The recyclery roof was washed with a much thinned version of the aforementioned rust mix. I didn’t want to obliterate the base colour of the roof, just give a hint of rust and aging.

The roof over the mystery tank at the rear of the Marble Works was painted a blue colour mixed on the palette from Testors Model Master Acryl Maritime Blue and Chevy Engine Red (which looks orange too me) to give an aged, grayed blue colour. After the roof dried, it too was washed a bit with the thinned rust mix.

{No, that's not coffee - that's the gunk wash}

The corrugated metal panels – and the walls of the recyclery - were then washed with a thinned, non-uniform mix of Testors Flat Black and Tamiya Smoke. I apply this pretty liberally to the model and use tissues and a thirsty brush – one that’s a just a little damp that can absorb pools of wash if they collect along panel lines or at eves – to control the density of paint application.

The balsa wood loading docks and framing are painted with a very loose mix of the initial thinned gray wash used on the metal panels, flat black-smoke wash, and gunk wash residue from my brush cleaning jar.

All this painting and application of washes took some time. It happened over a series of days because I like to sit back and look at the results of each step for awhile to see if any corrections or additional applications need to be made before proceeding.

The sign on the recyclery is just an item printed from my computer and glued to a basswood backing. It was washed very, very lightly with a nearly dry brush that had been dipped in the gunk wash. It’s easy to overdo it and obliterate the letters, so I’d recommend erring on the side of caution and applying several very thin washes until the desired effect is achieved. This also helps prevent the backing board from warping. The recycling logo was downloaded from the internet and prepared in the same way.

I don’t yet have a good idea for the Barrel & Marble Works signage. I’ll add these later.

The roof-top pipes on the Marble Works were made from styrene tubing. The tube wall was fairly thick and had to be drilled out to thin it down to something more scale-like. I’m not sure what these pipes are meant to drain, but I mixed up some Tamiya Purple and Tamyia Yellow Green to create a sickly gray ooze that I painted on the roof at the pipe exits. These pipes could probably use a little support structure, but I think I’ll leave them be for the time being and maybe revisit that later.

I’ve mentioned in passing a few times that using the Campbell corrugated paneling and the textured plastic on the recyclery was rather un-E. L. Moore like. A more Moorian approach might have used the embossed paper method for the metal siding, and maybe scored wood for the recyclery walls. I think that if I had used those materials I couldn’t have painted the structure using the methods I did. The Moorian materials I think would have been too soft and absorbent, and may have disintegrated or warped during painting. The metal and styrene surfaces in this project can stand-up very well to repeated applications of paint, brush work, and washes, so they have at least that to recommend them even though they aren’t the most inexpensive materials to build with.

The last thing I did was add figures and props, and some plastic ‘glass’ to the windows. That’s it. I’m going to declare it done for now. There are a few buildings on the layout that I want to add a little more detail to, and I’m planning on coming back in a few months and fixing them up all at once. This one may get a little renovated then.