Black spray: A technique for unifying the overall hue of a layout by over spraying with a mist of flat black spray paint.
Usage: Hal decided to black spray his layout a few days before the magazine photographer arrived.
Source: Gil Mellé appears to be the original source of this technique, and described it in his September 1963 Railroad Model Craftsman article, Scenery to Improve Your Layout. Mellé notes:
Have you ever looked at your entire layout and noticed that some parts of it seem to stand out in an unsatisfactory way. After two years of work every individual component looked satisfactory but when the whole of my layout was viewed it was not [sic] anything but a harmonious integration……Here’s what I did to correct this. It took two minutes, a spray can of flat black and a track cleaner……I covered my entire layout with a mist of the stuff. I aimed above everything so that the minuscule particles of wet paint would fall on everything as soot issued from the fiery stack of an iron horse, is hurled sky high and deposited on everything around. Of course the walls around the pike were protected with newspapers taped in place……It worked!
The technique strikes this editor as a bold and unforgiving one with serious consequences if not properly executed.
from The Dictionary of Non-Existent Model Railroad Terms, 2nd ed., 1999.
Sounds a bit like the era when folks were "washing" everything - buildings, streets, trains, etc. with an alcohol and India ink mixture to tone them down. I wonder how many modelers took Gil's advice.
ReplyDeleteI was chatting with Vince about this technique today and he suggested that if the spray was high enough above the layout the paint particles should be more-or-less dry by the time they land, so mistakes might be able to be vacuumed away. To me it still seems a bit risky. I'd think you'd need to use just the right paint, in just the right conditions, at just the right height. I'll have to see if there were and letters to the editor in the months following the publication of this article to see if there was any feedback.
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