Painting pt 2, the undergubbins

While I amass the dutch courage required to put the decals on the bodies, attention turns to the bits which are not going to be red. The underframe of any piece of NZR rolling stock is dark, dirty and dusty, and the 88 seaters were no exception.

To get the right sort of colour build up we are going to work in layers moving from the darkest colour to the lightest. This means starting with black, and moving through the shades of brown. For todays first tip, PAINT ALL THE SUB ASSEMBLIES BLACK BEFORE GLUING THEM TO THE UNDERFRAME. Sorry about the yelling, but this is not in the instructions, and I've discovered that theres some areas that are extremely hard to get to with a paintbrush. Make sure that the black gets into all the nooks and crannys and that you have complete coverage of all the bits.

Now we get into one of the most useful painting tricks that a modeler can have. Its called dry brushing, and most of you will have at least heard of it. For those of you who haven't, Here is a (very) short description. You will need a sizable brush that has lost its point and is quite soft, something that you would normally use to paint large areas I I seem to have a stack of brushes that have lost their points)


Dip it into the paint of a lighter shade to that of your base coat. and then wipe on a paper towel until almost all of the paint is removed. Then move to the area that you want to highlight. Move the brush from side top side with it just brushing across the surface. you should see a slow buildup of lighter paint on the high points of the area you are painting. Try not to overdo this as it can wind up looking a bit cartoonish. I also use this technique to give rolling stock a dusty weather beaten appearance, but I'll cover that at some point in the not too distant future.
For a first pass we will make it a bit easier, as we want a reasonably heavy coat of dark brown on the more exposed areas. I have used vallejo 147 leather brown, but humbrol 98 chocolate is also a good choice. Dip the brush nto the paint and then give it a quick wipe on the paper towel so that most of the panit is removed. Then brush on fairly heavily as we want a good coverage. In the photo we can see the difference between the treated left side and the plain right side.


Then I have used a light drybrush with Vallejo 124 Iraqi sand. The brush needs to have nearly all the colour taken out of it. Again the drybrushed side is on the left.


As you can see the drybrushing brings out the raised detail tricking the eye into seeing what it expects to see.