VO 1000 Weathering
To weather the VO1000 I used mainly artist chalks. I like the chalks
because they are very forgiving and sit in places much like real dirt
does. I ground up the chalk by rubbing it against some fine grit
sandpaper in a plastic dish. I then built up chalk on a large soft brush
and dusted the sideframes with it. Because most of the chalk is removed
when you clear-coat with the airbrush, I put on more than I thought I would
need. I went through several rounds of weathering like this until I
achieved the color I wanted.
I went light on the body weathering as the WM was known to keep their engines
very clean during the era I'm modeling. However, since this locomotive is
a yard switcher, I felt it necessary to weather it a bit more than some of the
road engines.
Here are the VO1000 truck sideframes ready to be dull-coated in the spray booth.
Here is a photo showing the Sergent coupler and the front end of the
locomotive. In this photo you can see some of the basic chalk weathering I
did on the trucks and grill. I used gray chalks for this round of
weathering. (This photo does not show the final weathering color, which
includes some brown as well as gray) The coupler was weathered using a
combination of rust and grimy black Polly Scale acrylic paints.
Oops!
This is what happens when you don't have enough light in your spray booth.
I added a final spray of a gray dusty color in the booth, and when I got the
locomotive into the full-spectrum lights, I saw that I had made it far far too
gray, especially around the base. I was able to later correct it with a
very thin spray of engine black, but it definitely would have been better
to avoid that in the first place. I now plan to put better lighting than
the single 18" fluorescent into my booth. :-)
To make things worse, I also managed to get a nice orange-peel effect (on the
main body) from the spray-can Testor's Dullcoat. I looked this up in
the newsgroups and found it to be a pretty common result of using the
can. Many folks either purchase the dullcoat in jars to airbrush, or
spray the can into a jar and airbrush from there. I think I might do the
same with the next loco. Good thing this is my first/test locomotive :-)
In the above photo you can also see that I added some more rust to the couplers
to help them stand out a bit more and look more realistic.
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