Colors and textures Part 1: Prototype color and its relationship to modeling/Bob Walker
bout 18 months ago I did a col- umn on color and light. It was pretty technical, and was in- deed about colors and lighting. Well, this month, we will discuss color from a whole different perspective and throw in texture to boot. By texture, I am re- ferring to the actual surface condition of the model, and not some philosophi- cal mumbo-jumbo. With the demise of Floquil as a hobby paint supplier, many of us will have to source our color elsewhere. A quick check of the good old Walthers catalog tells us that all is not lost. There are many paint manu- facturers left out there, and the color selection is still awesome. There are several brands of both solvent based and water based paints. It is the changeover that may be a bit painful, not just in the realm of financially painful but with the learning curve of the new paint thrown in to boot. We will have to teach ourselves how the new stuff works. There are some TV shows that ma- nipulate the colors so badly that they border on the bizarre. The colors are so saturated and stark, that they detract from the core drama of the show itself. They look ridiculous. The reason I bring this up, is that there are some layouts that suffer the same fate of un- realistic coloring. Their colors are so stark that they detract from the scene. They are what I call omni-color mar- vels. Even in high noon sunlight, the real world is not that starkly bright or made up of so few colors. There are few pure colors in nature, and there are certainly more than the 256 colors that a typical computer monitor can display. Way more! We should try to use more than that wherever we can.
A Real world colors are somewhat mut-
ed, and show up differently as weather and lighting conditions change. Friend Mike Ritschdorf visited Accurail on a regular basis with prototype photos of freight cars, which he kindly provided to our art department. I specifically re- member a set of photos of a BNSF three-bay ACF grain hopper. There were two photos: one taken flat on from each side. One was sunlit and the other was from the shaded side. Unless you noted the car number and believed Mike (which we did), who told us the two shots were taken no more than a minute apart on that sunny day, they appeared as two distinctly different
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Scratchbuilder’s Corner
cars. One was a muted grayish mineral red, and the other was a stark mineral red with the emphasis on “red.” Lighting makes all the difference in the world. Most of our layouts have a fixed lighting system. The lighting is what it is, remaining unchanged. Sure, there are a few (very few) who go to great electronic lengths to change the time of day on their layouts, but most of us unwashed rabble have a layout lighting system that is more or less
constant until something burns out. Whatever that system is, it is best if the same lighting exists at your work- bench. If not, you may well be in for a rude surprise or two. If the bench light- ing is somehow different from that of the layout, frequent trips to the layout room are recommended during the col- oring phase of your model work. This will keep that nice warm mineral red on the bench from going evil on the railroad and turning purple. My layout sports warm fluorescent lighting (GE “kitchen” tubes to be exact), and my workbench is lit by several convention- al 100-watt light bulbs. Yes, I make fre- quent color- check trips to the layout (a whole 20 steps away).
There are a vast multitude of
PHOTOS BY THE AUTHOR
This wooden sand house (top) has been weathered to give the individual boards slight varia- tions in color. Lightly scrapping a board with a rough tool like Micro Mark’s Typhoon Burr (above left) can add texture to the wood. Washes (above right) can help to accentuate tex- tures and to tone down colors. Go easy when using these techniques, so you don’t over do it.
MAY 2014
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