At present I am learning about plastic using large scale kits and doing a lot of scratchin’ and bashin’.At the same time I am posting a lot of stuff that I have posted here in the past like painting techniques etc…Those pages are now lost in this already too long thread.I thought that with a little editing, what I am posting there could also be used here to refresh this thread a bit, until I get a chance to organize all this into an online book format somewhere down the line.
I forgot to mention that this painting method works really well for ramps,boardwalks,hangars,shacks, docks or anywhere the "old wood look "is required.
Weathering wood,everybody seems to have a different method here is mine.
The woods I generally use for model making are basswood,pine , birch tongue depressors and various sizes of coffee stir stiks.I have collected various widths and thicknesses till now.They are very strong and the raw wood has only been highly polished.
I like the barnsiding look and this is the way I do it.
Mix up a thin wash of paint using flat acrylics. Why flat acrylics ? because there is no varnish in them, to make the paint shine and who wants shiny barnsiding.For this wash I use Nimbus Grey with a touch of Raw Umber added plus lots of water.I brush this on the wood letting it soak into the raw wood.Do not use a sealer at any time during this process.After 2 or 3 thin coats you should have a nice gray with some of the wood grain showing through.You want to take advantage of the transparency of acrylics for this technique.When happy let the wood dry or use a hair dryer to speed up the process.This wood is now ready for use and should have an aged look about it. To be cont…
…because of its transparency it is necessary to hand select each piece of wood used for color,grain,unwanted out of scale imperfections etc…
OK so now we have a lot of stained wood of various wood tones and grays.Now we will have to decide whether or not to take the weathering process a little farther at this point or not.If you will always have easy access to the wood like on the outside of a shack wall ,go ahead and use it as is, but if it is inside in a confined area you can take it a few steps further at this time.
(With this method no airbrushing is required and the methodology is very forgiving of mistakes.)
Get an old toothbrush with stiff fine bristles,then mix up a very thin wash of raw umber and water.Raw umber is best for this step as it makes for a nice representation of mud flecks,fly sh.t etc…Dunk your toothbrush in the mix and flick off most of the contents onto a sheet of paper with your thumb.When you get down to a very fine spray then flick it on your work ,either board by board or section by section that you are working on.If you have prepared your boards properly it with instantly sink into the wood and dry very quickly.Keep doing this until you are satisfied ,and remember some boards that are close to the ground may require a gradual change in intensity top to bottom.Later some may even require a little mossy green were they come in contact with the ground.
to be cont…
…On the areas where you may only have restricted access to later on, you may want to do some of the detail now such as dents, nicks, scratches,putting up old of new signs,making rusty nails and nail holes and pre-shading with chalk pastels.
With the use of pastels on dry unfinished rough wood, this is where my method is a little different than most.On most surfaces chalk pastels will easily rub off but on rough wood surfaces they are quite permanent as is, with no fixative required.Remember I am doing a diorama here, so it is just to look at.If I was using the same method on shiny plastic that is meant to be handled,I would roughen up the surface to get a little tooth in it before applying the pastels and then use a pastel spray fixative over that.I will mark that on my list for further experimentation.
For now lets just deal with the barn siding look.OK so now we have this gray transparent surface with a little wood color and grain showing through.Perfect! Lets add some nail holes and rusty nails which is common with most old wood.Find a pattern that you like or just put a few here and there but remember you are probably( in real life )nailing into joists or studs which will create its own pattern.Rather than have a whole bunch of old boards with a straight line of nails running across them which is boring,you may want to create a different pattern.I often use a kind of zig-zag pattern to avoid this…to be continued(the doorbell is ringing!)
The wood siding that I put on the model today was treated with a couple of washes of the gray mix.Some edges were left broken on the ends. Remember old breaks can be aged too but new breaks should show a change in color back to the original wood.
I then took a sharp needle and added some nail holes not in a pattern but not just randomly either. Then I took a sharp HB pencil and added a little graphite to each hole to make it look like a nailhead.Later when finishing the weathering I will add a drop of water to each hole which will swell the hole back level again but leaving behind something that looks like nails.I will then add some rust and have it running into and down the wood.The whole thing will be softened using pastels which are put on last after all the handing is over but that is still a long way down the road.
On creating old wood.
I almost finished the interior ceiling ,the only thing left will be to do some shading with pastels after the sides are finished.I used some long thin coffee stir stiks and painted on some very thin nimbus gray /raw umber mix (95% gray,5% raw umber).I then glued them on with carpenters glue to the underlying cardboard roof that was pre-painted burnt umber .I left the boards really rough and warped for the aged look.When dry I took a pin and created holes in the wood in a random fashion, as though somebody had quickly nailed them up there at some point in the cars history ,for insulation purposes.I then used a ordinary HB pencil and twisted some graphite into each hole to represent a nail head.With a small brush I then took some very thin raw umber and put a small drop on each pin hole to swell the wood level again and add a little color.Next I mixed up a very thin wash of raw umber and with a stiff bristle tooth brush I flicked on some of this onto the ceiling.You could also have handy a thin wash of the gray and flick this on if things get too brownish.The trick here is knowing when to quit and not cover all of the underlying wood grain.
The next couple of steps require that you be subtle in your work and don’t over do it.Take a thin burnt sienna wash and with a very small round brush randomly put drops onto the nails to represent varying degrees of rust.Rust you say!! in the desert? Well like I said earlier this car only ended up here.
Let it dry ,and then you can come back with another small brush and soften the rusty edges using a little burnt sienna chalk pastel.Also the ends of the boards tend to soak up a little color too.Now stand back a take a look If your not happy with the look you can always come back and flick on some more gray or raw umber if you want more color or to slightly change a shade.Here again you can play with this all day if you want.Have fun! The pics in my photobucket covers each of the steps involved.
Here we are getting close to the finished product.I added a little shading using black pastel applied very lightly with a small soft brush(kind of a miniature make up brush).Try to be very subtle about this ,try not to overdo it.
If you blow up the picture(all my pics are 2 megs at least) you will see that the underlying wood grain is still there which is most important for this technique.Each piece of wood retains its individual pattern and color ,no two are alike.
You know the modern dioramist (word?) is soo lucky ! I am surprised that more of us haven’t really used all the tools available to us for research and especially for visual playin’ around.Sitting here at my computer I have available to me, in my own home,all the possible visual reference I could ever want.I can scan for the minutest detail and teach myself things that only a few short years ago you would have to go to film school for and even then it would be filtered through a teacher who has his own biases.
This is really the golden age for visual artists who want to take advantage of all the tools now available to them.
I never in my wildest dreams thought that this level of research was possible until just recently.When I was a kid going to the Saturday movies, my buds and I would come home and act out what we saw in the movies.Endless hours of childhood arguments over who did what or how, can now be solved instantly.
This may or may not be a good thing for our childhood imaginations but now at least we can get on with playing the game.
Hi John! It sounds like you have been making a great process. I think it will be very helpful if you can post pictures if you want to get more comments and feedback from us. Trust me guys love pictures! Looking forward to see your completed diomara. [Y]
Hi Andy! I haven’t been posting a lot of pics because right now I am between projects.I am waiting for the museum to advise me about their plans for displaying my dioramas before I can finish them.That is supposed to happen next week and at that time I will return to the active building of the airplane dioramas.Stand by one!
Cheers ! John.
You know it is funny how it goes with art. I started off wanting to do and learn about everything.Take figures for example,I wanted to learn how to do them as I thought at the time, that they really completed a diorama.Normally this is true ,they add a sense of scale and life to the scene.In my work I only used them in relaxed positions,standing talking in groups for example.No action not even walking as I felt that it broke the illusion of "a moment in time."My first diorama had three figures,the next five,after that too many for the fourth diorama, then it was back to one, and now none.
A lot of artists are the same from what I see around me.In the beginning they want to prove that they can master the techniques,then having done that they want to experiment with their own ideas and a lot of the time it is about minimizing things to the point where you can get say what you have to say as simply as possible.
Some artists minimize a whole aspect of their art and tell an even more powerful story by letting the viewers imagination fill in the blanks. Making a film with 15 pages of dialogue in a 3 hour piece is a wonderful example of this.When you do it right it can become a masterpiece !
The aviation museum called and they will be picking up their stuff within the next month. I am not expecting a lot to do to finish their first three dioramas.The fourth aircraft and the train diorama will be worked on over the winter.I will however still be doing research on the train diorama and will post anything interesting in the meantime.
Quote:
Originally Posted by choo choo  Hey John,  Your concept is as fascinating as the modelling exercise. How do you think up stuff like that? Greg |
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Well thank you Greg that is the biggest compliment you could ever give my work!
I have been doing different art forms for many years saying to myself "why didn’t I think of that?“It is the originality that always alluded me until now,I found myself saying the same thing " how do they think up stuff like that?”
With ordinary modeling it is still that way with me but with dioramas I seem to have found my niche late in my life.I think that it is the storytelling I like most and taking pictures of the project underway and when it is completed and “in the can” so to speak.After that the fun for me is over and I just enjoy putting the stuff in museums and such for others to see and hopefully have a few of the young ones catch the bug of making dioramas too.
I find that most modelers are "History "minded and stuck on replicating reality ,I just want to bring some fun back into it like when we were kids with unbounded imaginations.Just the mention of “artistic license” drives some modelers crazy,Why? I don’t know because anything fun to do requires a certain suspension of belief and modeling like other entertainments is no different.
Because of this fact I thought that it would be fun to kind of play a little trick on Hollywood and the like and switch things around a little by having the director from his point of view think everything looks normal while the viewer is really in on the magic.
Anyway,thanks again ! you have really made this old guy happy.One last thing and really what I am most happy about is that I was lucky enough to have the time and good health to accomplish this in the decade of my 60’s.With art it is never too late to work on your dreams.Cheers! John.
The following are pics that I took for the Canada Aviation and Space Museum ,of the final assembly of the first three dioramas ,for their future reference purposes.They will be deciding how to display them with only a few suggestions from me.I think that all the lighting will have to be changed to LED’s or out of the case lighting ,as the glass case can’t be removed to change a bulb.Therefore the pics that I have already taken and am taking now is how the dioramas were originally intended to be displayed.When I started 10 years ago LED"s were not readily available to modelers.The Albatros lighting is the most complicated as I used RR type for this.The Jenny is regular doll house lighting and the N28 is the simplest of all, 2 Christmas bulbs that plug into the wall.
I will suggest to them that the best use of the N28 would be as a shadow box but as you will see there are alternatives available to them.
Pics added to CASM final assembly album in photobucket.
N28 diorama
CASM 013 front,no lighting
012 L/H side panel off
011 " " " on
010 R/h side panel off
009 " " " on
008 panel details
007 & 005 rear panel off
006 rear panels off
004 " " on
003 & 002 lighting arrangement
001 First 3 dioramas unlighted
This diorama was meant to be lit both inside and out that is why the boards have been painted black because the thin wood otherwise would allow light to shine through.A slight separation has been maintained between each board for an "iinside the barn "look which would be option one.Option two would be to leave the side and rear panels off so the dio could be viewed from all sides,Personally I would prefer a shadowbox type arrangement with the barn look.
John: this is a huge deal, getting your dios into the museum at last. Congratulations. You’ll be reaching a huge audience, and most likely influencing kids that visit the museum.
Can you post a link to the museum so that we know where it is etc so that if we are in Canada can come and pay hommage to your builds.
NK
