Taking the shine off it…

I have long respected those artisans, modellers, artists who master not only the application of paint to reflect dirt, but who master sheen too, to create a model that just sings with colour. Texture, shadow and wear and tear implied by just paint and lacquer…

In the past I’ve practiced this myself - both before and after the dirt. I’ve polished Hornby steam locomotive pain finishes before and ’ve applied gloss lacquer sparingly over a weathered 7/8ths model. The intention is the sheen reflects the experience of viewing the model in reality. Sheen varies in the prototpe due to degradation of paint yes, but also accumulation (and removal, if shoes or hands polish a surface) of dirt. The atmosphere can also have a subduing effect when we look at real things from a hundred metres or so… 

So sheen is important.

One thing I’ve noticed in N though, is how layout lighting can bounce off the surface and bleach out a portion of the model or appear unrealistically shiny. In some cases, I knock down the sheen by applying a satin lacquer carefully from above only, which is quite effective. However, there are also times when it works to kill the sheen across a whole surface.

This is a pair of Intermountain N scale 4550 cu.ft. ‘Canadian’ grain cars. The one on the left, box fresh. The one on the right, treated to a weathered underframe and some satin lacquer.

(Eric Gagnon has a lovely blog post about these cars, their history and some of his period photos).

In my proposed period of Canadian N these cars would have been new. This raised a challenge in weathering, especially in a smaller scale. New is actually very difficult to model!

I figured, even after a few runs from the prairies to the sea they’d have a dirty underframe and a layer of grime. The experiment here was to see if a simple satin coat was adequate to suggest that, or if I needed to apply a wash or airbrushed dirt to the bodywork too…

It appears, that just ‘taking the shine off it’ has effectively weathered the car for me.

Whilst I may treat the second to a little more work, it is good to slow down sometimes and challenge and consider our approach rather than just applying the same methods and techniques we are comfortable with… until next time, more soon…

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