Some thoughts on weathering...

With the upcoming RPM meet plus train show season coming up with the usual fall and winter shows here in Colorado, I thought I'd share a few thoughts on weathering, and some things I do in my weathering.

One thing I do is I use an actual paint booth from MicroMark that's not vented to the outside, however, I use my own extra custom double filter on top of their standard filters for the booth.

Second thing I recommend is whether you're working with acrylics or oils, always wear some type of mask. Even powders and pigment dust has a chance of finding a nasal passage!

Third thing I do is after several uses of a bottle of acrylics, I clean the tips on the bottles from excess paint (Vallejo squeeze bottles), especially the gloss and matte finish bottles.

Next is a tip for actual weathering. A trademark of mine is I ALWAYS finish and weather the undersides of cars. Yes, you really don't see the underside of boxcars, but you sure do with covered hoppers, tank cars, and some coil cars. On boxcars, you don't see the underside when on the layout, but if you're in an operating session and a visitor says "wow!, who did that weathering" and picks up that car, what will they see? A plain black glossy underside of plastic, or a natural looking weathered appearance?

One other tip I'll leave you with today is I also always do the brake wheels and brake chains plus the cross platforms. You'll find I do these first with Vallejo rust texture and whole wet , dab a medium or dark rust powder over top of them. I'll usually do the same with the trucks as shown below:

That's all for today. More soon....