Electric Railroad Gazette


August, 2000

Hello again, we're back! I think we left off last time finishing the mountains and rock faces, and casting and installing the cast resin tunnel portals and retaining walls. Everything is taking longer than anyone would expect. Finishing the new Z track layout around the California mountains took quite awhile, and then we added a new waterfall on the back wall. Each project took a month, and when painting began, I was ready.

I painted the entire layout with medium brown paint first. I used waterbase paint, but it doesn't stick to the resin castings real good. It does stick, but can be scratched off a little easier than I'd like. The guy from Bragdon Enterprises said to paint the rocks with gesel, the artist's white base paint, but I found it was too thick and we lost a lot of detail. It probably would have stuck to the resin better though.
After that, I got my tubes of acrylic paint of Raw Umber, Burnt Umber, Raw Sienna, Orangebrown, and Yellowbrown and began camalflouging the rocks. I painted one color like spots over a section, and then another color, making more spots. When it was all spotted, I used a cup of water and a rag to wet the brush and smear the colors together, clean the brush with the rag, and smear some more. This blends the spots of color together. Remember to keep cleaning the brush with the rag.

It didn't look like real rocks yet, but hold on, we're getting there. Right now it looked like a brightly colored camalfouge of browns, yellows, and oranges. Although I diluted the colors with white almost to an earthy pastel but not quite, they were still more colorful than rocks and more camalflouge looking. It's important to have them more colorful than reality at this point. The next step was the black wash step. Using a spray bottle, (actually I went through a few spray bottles), I sprayed a very diluted black paint or india ink over the rocks, letting it flow into the cracks. Using a soft rag, I wiped away any from the rock faces, leaving the cracks. It looked great, but when it dried, the cracks were still not black enough to really stand out, so I did it again. This time the cracks and black depths looked more realistic. The black slightly darkened the color of the rocks even though It flowed off or was wiped off. Now they were almost the right faded-looking color for rocks.

After this dried, the next step is the trick. It's the drybrush effect, with my own version of "glazing." Mix white with a little brown to get a brownish off-white and drybrush a section as usual. If you don't remember, dip the brush in paint, wipe off almost all of it on a scrap piece of wood, and then lightly brush over the highlights of the rock face. This highlighting looks unrealistic though, as it doesn't blend in with the color well. This type of drybrushing looks good on buildings with sharp edges, but for mountains, we need a little more softer blending look.

Get a brush, some water, maybe a spray bottle of water too, and a rag. Clean the brush and wet it, and then lightly smear the hightlights out. Be very careful doing this, as only a couple strokes can be done before you start ruining the effect. Clean the brush with the rag every few strokes, or the glazing will get muddy looking. The glaze must be the off-white so it creates a see-through effect. You must also do this smearing before the drybrushing gets completely dry. If you smear too much, the drybrush highlight gets lost and the rock gets too light. If you dont clean your brush, it gets muddy and covers the nice colors underneath.

Next, I had to paint all the tunnel portals, which was another month of work. Using the same technique of black wash and drybrushing, they were soon looking better, and I then painted a few random bricks slightly lighter or redder or more pastel to create a more realistic hand built detailed effect. After all the rocks and tunnels were painted, I planted the grass. I painted all the flat surfaces with diluted brown paint, then sprayed diluted scenic glue over the paint. Then I sprinkled on the hobby store grass and let it dry. The next day I sprayed another thick coat of diluted scenic glue over everything. It looks saturated at first, but the next day, it looks ok. Although the grass looks better without the overcoat of glue, you definitely do need this to keep the grass down. Now the layout looks like a golf course, so you've got to get some light brownish yellow grass and redo spots all over like camalfage so it looks real, and then spray glue over it all again. If you're good, you can do it all in one step.

Next I painted the roads black. actually gray. and began cleaning the tracks to get ready to run. Unfortunately the masking tape over the tracks had turned to glue over the months of construction, so It took some scraping and scrubbing to get it clean and shiny again. There was also a lot of fixing and chiseling and cutting away excess junk, and since the rock faces were all calked in with calking, I had to clean up edges, and cut out all the removable sections with an exacto knife. Almost all the rock faces are removable, and by cutting the rubbery calking, the sections fit back together like a glove.

I took out the removable sections, and calked the back as well, making them stronger. I also began getting things running, fixing track, switches, cars, engines, wiring, etc. It's been a month of tweaking just to get all the lines back up and running again. By tweaking I don't mean I'm a tweaker. I'm tweaking the track. I booked a date, Sunday, Sept 17th, for the next Openhouse, and made some flyers. I put them on our website, and am getting ready to mail them to all train clubs and stores. I'm also fixing all my engines and cars, and weathering them with chalk. Chalk is great.
Stay tuned