The Colour Of Money ....

[Neil]

.... is charcoal grey. It seems that these days we all look longingly back to the days when Britain's economy had a strong manufacturing component. Politicians tinker to try and shift the balance towards it, media commentates on their success or otherwise and (not so) old farts like me spout forth about the days when we built planes , trains and automobiles. However I'm old enough to remember that all this industry came with a cost and it looked like this. Now I happen to think there's some sort of magnificence in this and it's one that most railways set in urban territory during the days of steam fail to fully capture and I think that the reason is that our memories of how things were are diluted by the relative cleanliness of the current world. When I first met the first Mrs Rushby, she lived in a Lancashire mill town and the vogue for sandblasting a centuries worth of grime away from both civic buildings and private housing had just got under way. My childhood memories of Leeds and Keighley being black were being eroded by their own ambitions to be clean and modern. These days it's still possible to find urban areas not sandblasted clean (there are a few buildings near Manchester Victoria that have dirty faces) but the cause of the grime is long gone and many years worth of rain has fallen. I have an idea that modellers if not acting on the simplistic notion that bricks are brick coloured select paints based on some averaging out of how towns are now and photos of how towns were. Haranguing isn't very productive so I'll leave with a suggestion. Remember the photo of Bradford? Irfanview (and I'd guess other image handling software) has a range of effects that can be applied at the click of a button. In this case it's the oil paint function that comes to our rescue. Dialled up to near maximum abstraction it gives this result, from which it's easy to pick out the dominant colour.

 

[Simon]

.... is charcoal grey. ....... When I first met the first Mrs Rushby, she lived in a Lancashire mill town and the vogue for sandblasting had just got under way.

View attachment 14382

Well I must say that she has scrubbed up very well

Simon

 

[Dog Star]

Well I must say that she has scrubbed up very well

Tsk, tsk .

 

[Simon Dunkley]

I have an idea that modellers if not acting on the simplistic notion that bricks are brick coloured select paints based on some averaging out of how towns are now and photos of how towns were.

There is also the related issue of brilliant white window frames pre circa 1960...

 

[lancer1027]

I think that's why I find so many layouts - especially in the Mags - rather disappointing... they may be technically excellent models, or had plenty of money thrown at them (DCC sound, smoke, lights everywhere etc) but these days so many of them just seem far too clean..!!! This applies as much to early diesel-era layouts as steam, as well.

I would agree totally Jordan, but there might be a reason for it... Listening to a lot of modellers over the years one common issue is they dare'nt weather. Frightened to spoil it with a load of gunk etc.

I actually think my weathering leaves a lot to be desired compared to a lot on here but i hate clean stuff so i try to tone down.

Rob

 

[Neil]

I would agree totally Jordan, but there might be a reason for it... Listening to a lot of modellers over the years one common issue is they dare'nt weather. Frightened to spoil it with a load of gunk etc. .....

I'd agree that the 'dare not' factor is one of the reasons why the colour balance seems wrong, but there are a good number of models out there where some weathering/grubbying has taken place but where I'd suggest that the terms of reference are wrong. There are plenty of colour photos showing how dirty cities were, but it's almost as though the modeller can't quite bring themselves to believe them. It's surprising given how ingrained the concept of 'find a photo to model from' must be by now.

 

[Dikitriki]

This is a really interesting discussion, as it is something I am wrestling with at the moment in that I am currently weathering the cutting on Heyside.

This is where I am at the moment (the left hand wall is the more finished)....



Is the consensus that it is not yet dark enough?

Richard

 

[28ten]

This is a really interesting discussion, as it is something I am wrestling with at the moment in that I am currently weathering the cutting on Heyside.

This is where I am at the moment (the left hand wall is the more finished)....

View attachment 14399

Is the consensus that it is not yet dark enough?

Richard

Id say its too clean that wall would have a hundred odd years of muck on it.....

 

[Dog Star]

I'm far happier to weather something I've painted & detailed myself than I am with something new out the box.

.... the best advice of course is to practice on something cheap first!!

Defining what is "cheap" ... is another whole subject of course.....

A good summary of what can stop people from taking the first step to creating a more realistic representation of the prototype.

If people are concerned about setting to with a pride and joy then here are some suggestions for practice material:-
[1] paint some sheets of material in the same manner as the model... try out differing weathering paints and thereby get the feel of applying the medium;
[2] consider purchase of embossed / moulded plastic sheet... paint as per the model and use for experimenting with dry-brush and shading techniques;
[3] look through the ranges of supplies like Knightwing and Ratio for packets of parts which resemble the grills and detail of diesels;
[4] haunt the swap meets and ask traders if they have body-only or damaged model offereings;
[5] try the charity shops for cheap(er) models.

regards, graham

 

[mickoo]

A good summary of what can stop people from taking the first step to creating a more realistic representation of the prototype.

If people are concerned about setting to with a pride and joy then here are some suggestions for practice material:-
[1] paint some sheets of material in the same manner as the model... try out differing weathering paints and thereby get the feel of applying the medium;
[2] consider purchase of embossed / moulded plastic sheet... paint as per the model and use for experimenting with dry-brush and shading techniques;
[3] look through the ranges of supplies like Knightwing and Ratio for packets of parts which resemble the grills and detail of diesels;
[4] haunt the swap meets and ask traders if they have body-only or damaged model offereings;
[5] try the charity shops for cheap(er) models.

regards, graham

Better yet, ebay always has a pile of old bodies only for sale at stupid low prices, doesn't even have to be in the scale you model, ie practise of 4mm even if you model 7mm, the techniques are still the same, but there are some detail differences you need to consider in 7mm due to the larger scale allowing more detailed weathering, but, overall the base technique remains the same.

 

[mickoo]

This is a really interesting discussion, as it is something I am wrestling with at the moment in that I am currently weathering the cutting on Heyside.

This is where I am at the moment (the left hand wall is the more finished)....

View attachment 14399

Is the consensus that it is not yet dark enough?

Richard

I'd go with the Guv'nor, whilst what you have looks very nice and probably what 'everyone' expects to see on a model, it does not represent a working railway toward the latter end of steam and indeed even today, eg the run into Liverpool Street has never been cleaned in areas and the brickwork is near black, only broken up with water seepage which leaves a green slimy residue down the courses, has anyone ever seen that modelled?, rarely I'd guess, but most cutting walls weep and in recent years support vegitation growing halfway up it, buddlias are the most inventive of plants when choosing a location to live LOL. With the predominat colour being black it'll be texture that will give it relief and that is much harder to achieve.

Another area is trackwork, almost always near black after years of steam and even diesel loco running, whilst authentic it does seem to agitate our senses and we seem more readily to accept a cleaner model environment even when we know it may not be authentic.

Regarding locos, I prefer the run in weathered look, say after a month of working, the ultra filthy does not appeal to me, neither in 1:1 scale or any other scale, but that's just my anorak.

 

[Dikitriki]

Thanks for the input. It's really just confirmed what I felt, but wanted someone else to say. It's quite difficult to do black well!

Richard

 

[Simon Dunkley]

Thanks for the input. It's really just confirmed what I felt, but wanted someone else to say. It's quite difficult to do black well!

Richard

Do dark grey/charcoal instead...
Or use gunmetal - not the metallic variety.

 

[Dog Star]

... I am currently weathering the cutting on Heyside.

Is the consensus that it is not yet dark enough?

My impression is that (a) the blue-grey is more what I expect than the orange-ochre and (b) the picture suggests that the LHS wall is too bright. However, caution... there is a portion of the wall on the RHS which appears to be receiving full sunlight (did you drag the baseboard out of the cellar) so some consideration needs to be given to the lighting of the model and disposition of a wall relative to the compass.

As a first step, I suggest that you darken the areas which show the orange ochre colour and give some thought to the lightness / brightness of the mortar courses.

regards, Graham

 

[Dog Star]

It's quite difficult to do black well!

Start with Payne's Grey and let that down with something like French Grey with a touch of slimy green (or in Games Workshop colourings, Chaos Black, Codex Grey, Rotten Flesh and Bleached Bone rather than Skull White).

What does strike me as unusual is that the surface is so flat... and so vertical - very few buttresses and not as wide / deep as I might expect, no batter to the wall. In short, no obvious engineering to resist the sideways pressure from the weight of earth and housing adjacent to the wall (shades of Black Harry Tunnel here).

If there was more "relief" in the way of buttress tops (aka buttress in the style of those often to be found on churches) and the inclusion of string courses near to the top of the wall (even recessed panels) then there would be opportunities for adding vegetation, especially Buddlia, to introduce some brightness into the dark and damp gloom of the cutting. Do not forget the detritus from passing trains abandoned in the cess, for example soggy papers, and that thrown over the parapet (Silver Cross coach-built body in your period... no supermarket trollies!).

regards, Graham

 

[Dikitriki]

Hi Graham

The boards were photographed in the middle of the cellar (given the building, it's really an undercroft), so we had natural light coming in from the right, and artificial light coming in from the left. Even that isn't the whole story as the houses on the embankment on the left throw shadow on to the near wall on the right which is 2 x dry brushing session behind the wall on the left! Confused?

I think I have probably gone as far as dry brushing will take me, so the next step is to paint on a dilute matt dirty black (which is really a dark grey) and take it off pretty quickly, then airbrush various shades, a dirty track colour from the bottom and a sooty black more towards the top. What an effort....and there's a lot of wall. What I don't want to do is to lose the colour variations and tones I have produced.

Tomorrow is a Heyside Day, so I shall post some more progress then. With a bit of luck, we shall also be planting one of the very exclusive Cynric/Dikitriki designed lattice footbridges

Richard

 

[Dog Star]

Richard, your post above shows that you recognise that there is a difference in the weathering due to the source of the muck. I suggest that only the effects of soot are likely to be truly black, everything else is going to be a mixture of black (soot), brown (brake block dust, rust and dirt) and grey (ash from exhaust), hence there is going to be a graduation in colour and brilliance from top to bottom of the wall.

regards, Graham

 

[Neil]

This is a really interesting discussion, as it is something I am wrestling with at the moment in that I am currently weathering the cutting on Heyside.

This is where I am at the moment (the left hand wall is the more finished)....

View attachment 14399

Is the consensus that it is not yet dark enough?

Richard

Can I be cheeky and suggest that the left hand wall could do to be greyer and perhaps a shade darker too. Looking at images of the West Riding (I assume that Heyside is similarly blessed with industry and terrace hosing heated predominantly by coal, adding to the rail derived grime) very little of the stone colour of retaining walls breaks through the grey. Here's a piece of footage, (the first 15 seconds will do) shot on a well lit day that shows how all encompassing the grey was.

As a bonus check out the first blue and grey carriage in the train from 4.10 to 4.30.

 

[Dikitriki]

Hi Neil

Not cheeky at all. It's better to have input now before it's 'finished' than to be told when it's more difficult to do anything about it. I value the comments made on this site, and am happy to receive any constructive criticism

Whether I can achieve what is in my mind's eye is an entirely different matter.

Regards

Richard

 

[Ressaldar]

Hi Neil

Whether I can achieve what is in my mind's eye is an entirely different matter.

Regards

Richard

pour yourself another glass of your favourite tipple - and will be achievable in no time

'cheers' Mike