Painting Wood Loads

I had three flat car loads to experiment upon, and with time running short before the Railway Modellers’ Meet, I got right to work.

I had picked up a Vallejo paint pack for wood and leather when I went to Burnaby Hobbies for some primer. The “Dark Sand” in the pack seemed a good starting point, and so, I airbrushed the three test loads with that. Obviously, the result was too uniform, so I followed that up by picking out individual boards with washes of “Orange Brown.” That was okay, but lacked any appearance of grain. So, then I tried dry-brushing some of the same Orange Brown, which produce some interesting effects, but also ran the risk of darkening the whole side of the load. The winning approach to grain effects was obtained with a fan brush.

The load still looked like a monolithic piece of plastic, and so I tried a little Tamiya “Dark Brown Panel Line Accent Color”. That worked poorly on the matte finish, but showed promise. A second attempt following a coating with Pledge was much better.

In the end, these loads look pretty good. I don’t know if they are as realistic as a stack of scale lumber. And I don’t know that they were much less work. However, I learned some stuff along the way, and that’s something to celebrate.