Bar Mills REA Baggage Cart: Paint or Pastels?

 The recommendation of the primer coat is more to seal the wood and prevent warping. The wood on these models is pretty thin and if a water base paint is used the parts may start to curl. It's also a lot easier to paint parts before cutting them out. I agree a coat of primer tends to go on a little thick. I generally use either True Color paint or Scalecoat 1 and spray from an airbrush. Both are solvent based.  This will seal the wood and not cover up the details. 

 If you can get the look you want with chalk it's worth a shot. My experience with it  is that it tends to blow away even when using an airbrush on low pressure when trying to fix it into place. Never tried chalk on bare wood and it may adhere better than onto painted plastic.

We simply used rattle can grey primer from Lowes followed by dark green. Painted wheels with primer followed by black and red enamel.

Allow to dry and weathered with chalk. Look great. Sorry for no pics but grandkids here and getting ready for church.

BarMills always recommends a light coat of gray primer on its wood kits to minimize warping if you're using acrylic paints. If you spray from 8-10 inches and keep the can moving, you should get a light coat. Do both sides. Even then, I weight down the pieces after a minute with a heavy object. Then apply a light acrylic coat, almost dry brushing it on (i.e easy on the amount of paint). Dark green is a great color, as Bill says. Adding a light coat of an alcohol and India ink (A&I) mix will also bring out the grain as it settles in the cracks. Trick for all of this is "less is more." You can always add. If you just want an old wood cart, without paint, just use the A&I, but be sure to weight down the pieces after application. You can then add some color afterwards by very lightly dry brushing a color in some sections and it will look like the remnant of a coat of the paint that has worn off. Try it on some scrap wood first to get the hang of it. 

Jerrman

Jerrman's mention of ink/alcohol mixtures is important. In fact, if you are looking for an "old/weathered wood" look, often using ONLY I/A can be very effective. Note that you can get artists inks in many colors, not just black.

I/A is the primary pigment I used in the little coffee-stirrer tool shanty project that I reported recently:

Something from (almost) nothing

Note how you can accentuate individual boards by dying them with different inks. You then blend it all together while weathering.

Thank-you all for sharing your tips and thoughts.  I've applied the grey primer and currently have the pieces sitting under a weight. It looks like the larger wood section had started to warp just in the packaging, so I hope it flattens out.  Fortunately, the primer retained some sense of the tiny wood grain.  My green and red acrylic paints it would appear are on the glossy end, so I will want to be careful and follow the less is more advice or perhaps see if some matte white or even ink will dull it.

The drink stirrer shanty project is wonderful and I like the way the stirrers take ink. In the past, I've picked up a few to place in O-scale die-cast truck beds, although the width is technically too wide uncut.

Unfortunately, this layout project is competing with desperate dissertation catch-up efforts today but I hope to make some progress on both. Thanks again for your thoughts and tips.

Tomlinson Run Railroad

For acrylics you will able to find dozens of craft type paints that are flat not shiny. (e.g. Delta Ceramcoat). Any craft store (Michaels), art supply store or even supermarkets with craft sections has them. Cost is usually $1.50 or less. If u do use the gloss paint, spray with Dull-coat, the lightly dry brush with white or sandstone (tan) to give it an aged look. I would recommend the flat acrylics, however. And they come in about a hundred colors. 

Jerrman

Well as it turned out the gloss wasn't a problem. (An aside: two years ago my software company gave all of us $800 worth of paint supplies for xmas -- seriously!  So, I hesitate to buy much in the way of new paints with this generous gift sitting idle -- up until today!)

Anyway, because of the small scale and the darkish grey primer, the red and green acrylics came out fine straight from the tube. I toned them down as needed with a swipe of a finger in true artistic fashion.  Before reading your post, I did try aging with a flat buff white but wasn't all that happy with that approach. There was only one color glitch: I painted the little wheel hubs green for an accent color and thought I had smudged the color out enough. But at present they are a bit "new" looking for something so close to the road dust. That is easily fixed.  

I'm glad that I didn't bother to unearth my pastels because I can now anticipate that the dust would have filled up the incised lines indicating boards on the carrier portion of the cart.  The precision fit of the kit was astonishing. The black lines left by the laser cutting added to the weathered, dirty, or in shadow look, and I used some diluted ink to match the color in places where the part had been attached to the wood matrix.

Thanks for the help everyone. It's too dark to photograph now but if I have time this week, I'll give it a try.

Best,

Tomlinson Run Railroad

Hi Folks,

Here's a quick post with some photos.  I really need a better camera!

First, there's the unassembled kit. Then an aerial view of the Trafford, PA PRR station with an REA boxcar, 1955 REA Chevy pickup, and the REA baggage cart. The train crew is so phenomenal that they are delivering mail from the future.  The black "baggage" is cut from a styrofoam steak package and still needs to be painted.  Various close-up shots round things out.  Note the slight warping in the cart bed -- that happened before priming.  I think it adds a nice distressed touch.  I also did a little hacking of the wood on the upright arms to give it that banged around look.  At some point I will either add a little touch-up with pastels or maybe a dusting of good old dirt from the front yard to tone down the green shine.  Maybe even splurge and get a can of Dullcote.  My decision to leave some of the laser cut black visible on various edges to give a worn or in shadow look works fine when observed "in the wild" but it clearly doesn't translate well to close-up photography -- lesson learned.

Tomlinson Run Railroad