Its almost over

All of you out there in reader land will be most relieved to know that the ed project is nearing its end. About the only job left was to do the painting (well, almost).

I had started off with a red oxide colour for the undercoat. I chose this to skew the top coat colour towards the darker more burgundy shade of red (at some point I'll do a more involved post on this).

After the base coat we move into the layered weathering system I've described before. a couple of coats of thinned out Tamiya 'Smoke' later, and we get to this sort of effect.
One thing that wasn't quite working at this point was the grill side of the loco's, as the paint was not settling in some areas to the degree that I wanted, Most noticeably the side vents and the small grills along the bottom. To fix this I put both locos on their sides and applied the wash just to these spots. problem solved.
The underframe didn't look quite dark enough and so this area got several coats of undiluted Tamiya smoke which seemed to do the job. After all this I laid on a coat of matt varnish to get rid of the gloss colour

Drybrushing was rather muted for these locos as they were relatively 'clean' due to the lack of steam locos in Wellington in this time period. In this case they just got a very light drybrush of chocolate brown on the lower sides, and a light drybrush of leather brown on the roofs. This seems to give about the right effect.


I also managed to hand paint the numbers on the headstocks. The missing bits are the cowcatchers (buggered if I know how to do these, soldering wire and brass failed completely)and couplers (which is a re-occurring theme and something I really need to fix soon).

To get away from Ed's and guards vans, are there any other modeling topics that people would like me to cover? All reasonable suggestions investigated, otherwise it will be onto some meat vans or even more guards vans.
Its your choice.