Weathering Projects

With the arrival of our newborn, my time in the layout room has been fairly limited.  However, I have been able to weather some cars that I can bring in and work on in the house.  I tried the color transition fade process using acrylic and water-soluble oil paints for the first time on these cars and am fairly happy with how they turned out.  I also used the reflective yellow strips from Smokebox Graphics and love how they turned out.

BNSF 432191

This was the first car I worked on.  I think the car is an Athearn rtr model.  I started out by fading the paint to a terra-cotta color by mixing various acrylic paints.  After that I used several coats of water-soluble oils to add dirt and grime.  

BN 458302

This is an old Athearn Bluebox model that has been sitting in a box collecting dust since Bush was in office.  I lightened the green with acrylics and and then again used the oils for heavy grime and dirt.  I added the Microscale graffiti decals before doing a final coat of dirt and grime.  To add some variety I added a few hatch’s that were printed with gray primer.  I’m not quite as happy with the final results of this model as you can see brush strokes and tide marks in the final finish.  Additionally, the dullcoat was applied too heavily.  

BNSF 488491

This is a Scaletrains Operator Series hopper car.  I wanted it to still look fairly new so I didn’t fade the paint color.  All that I did to this car was add several Microscale decals (to match the prototype) and then gave it a light coat of dirt and grime.