Day 07 - Dirty White, Boy!

No, not the song - I'm talking about dirty white paint!  But first, Happy Easter! 

Yesterday afternoon I completed assembling the walls of the structure and wasn't able to get pictures during the process, so here's a picture of the structure with all of the walls assembled.  What's with the pointer stick?  Well, instead of adding arrows using my graphic software pointing out areas why not just use one of my uncoupling picks?  Here I'm pointing out the addition to the rear of the structure.

Back to the dirty white thing.  I've seen a number of wonderful model railroad structures painted with too white white, or too black black.  Unless whatever the structure is was just painted TODAY pure white looks too stark and white. For this reason my "white" is actually VERY light gray and my "black" is actually VERY dark gray.  I do not use pure white and black colors out of the bottle.  I start with a piece of light colored paper for my mixing.  The circles are drawn on with a pen to give me different work areas.

The color in the enter of the circle is the pure white as it comes out of the Testors bottle.  The color to the left of that covering the black line is my "dirty white" which in this case was achieved by adding 3 drops of gray to the white.  This isn't an exact science - I just want to "dim" the white a little.

So I don't get corn-fused about what's in the bottle I mark it with a pen.  I don't want to mistakenly use this white for mixing other colors thinking that it's pure white.

Remember that I painted everything that gray base coat?  The reason I did that is because the dirty white won't completely cover that dark color when applied which gives variation in the coloring.  The amount of gray that shows through will determine how weathered the "white" paint is on the walls. This is just one coat of the dirty white.

Here's another group painted the dirty white.  To further complicate matters the paint that doesn't receive strong sun (such as shaded by the porches) will not be as faded and look less weathered.  I'll have to figure out which pieces those are and give them more coats of paint the the rest.

Well, I've run out of time as it's time to get ready for church.  I didn't finish painting all of the wall sections so that will continue when I get time.