In-ko-pah RR: Dos Manos depot

[lab-dad]

Man you nailed it!
Color & sheen look spot on!

they say to find a tile with a paw print in it is good luck

Marty

[TRAINS1941]

Coloring is perfect.

Jerry

[Hydrostat]

Ditto. Don't know the prototype but it simply looks like tiles ... Will the joints be colored darker or brighter? Hard to say from the picture if there's another tone in it.

Volker

[Ray Dunakin]

There are times with a project this big, that it really starts to feel like it's sitting on my head and crushing it. This is one of those times.     I had hoped to be nearly finished with the depot by now, but there's been too many other things going on and even when I do get to work on it, it just seems to take forever.

But anyway, I finally started making some progress on painting the "stone" walls of the depot. I began by giving all the walls a coat of thinned, sandstone-colored house paint:




Next I brushed on a dark concrete color. Before it dried I wiped it off with a paper towel, being careful to leave as much paint as possible in the mortar lines. This has to be done one small area at a time, or else the paint will dry before you can wipe it off:




The walls are supposed to look like a very light sandstone, similar to this:




So I had to go over each stone with another coat of sandstone paint, using a fine brush. I mixed in a small amount of white to lighten it slightly, and varied the mix so that the stones aren't all exactly the same shade:








Next I applied thin washes of various shades of rust and brown. To finish it off, I lightly dry-brushed the whole face of the wall with a mix of white and sandstone. I still need to go in with an extra fine brush to touch up some of the mortar lines, but I'll do that later:





That's one wall done, and only about 37 quintillion more stones to paint. Or so it seems.   


Did get started on the next portion:

[5thwheel]

Looking good, very good.

[Ray Dunakin]

On Saturday we had an open house for our club, the San Diego Garden Railroad Society. Although the depot wasn't finished, I put it out anyway and got a few photos of it on the layout:








Then back to work... I needed to find a way to paint the stone walls faster. I decided to try dry brushing the base color to get most of the stones covered, then just touch up by hand as needed. I tested this out on a wall inside the covered waiting area, where it wouldn't show too badly if it didn't work out. Fortunately it worked pretty well and did speed things up a little. Here's the wall after two coats of paint dry-brushed on, followed by touching up individual stones:




Next I added various shade of color to a few random stones, then finished it off by lightly dry-brushing the highlight color. It ended up a good match for the one wall I had previously painted the slower way:




With that settled, I continued on to the more prominent walls, taking up where I had left off. In this photo, on the left are the stones that were hand painted. On the right is an area where I've applied one coat of dry-brushed color:




Here's the same wall after a second dry-brushed coat and touch up:




And here it is finished:




Another area done the same way:








And here are a couple shots of how it looks so far. Still have a lot to do but at least it's progressing at a somewhat more tolerable rate:








That's all for now. Enjoy!

[finescalerr]

I hope the club members were impressed.

Are you thinking about applying a subtle weathering overspray once the basic painting is complete?

Russ

[Bill Gill]

The new technique works well. Like the benches too.

[Allan G]

Absolutely fantastic!!! Allan

[Sami]

Ray, I like this construction.

[michael mott]

Ray the last few interior shots, have that real "just need a sweep" to clean the dust of the floor reality to them. superb job all round on this one, but what also amazes me its that these buildings sit outside in the sun, and they are made of plastic.

Michael

[Ray Dunakin]

Well, after a lengthy hiatus due to family issues, I'm finally starting to get back into modeling and have made some more progress on the depot...

First off, I finished painting all of the tan-colored, random sandstone. I also painted the balconies to look like concrete, and painted the wooden beams, rafters, and eaves a dark brown. I painted the roofs too, and also put on a coat of base color on the large quarry stone blocks. Here are some pics of how it looks so far:










The sunlight really brings out the texture of the faux stone:




The structural frame of the bay window has been painted white, then slightly weathered:




The flat roof over the waiting area was given a "tar and gravel" treatment. I painted on a couple coats of flat black house paint. While the final coat was still wet, I sprinkled on some white, decorative stone grit from the craft store:




The Spanish tiles were painted a terra cotta color, with subtle variations on several random tiles:




I'm planning to give the quarry stone blocks a colorful, banded sandstone look, similar to the blocks on the Nevada Northern's depot in Ely, NV:




However, I want to change the color a bit. I'd like to match the colors in this sandstone fragment I brought home from one of my Nevada trips a few years ago. Below is a test piece. The color is very close but not quite there yet:




That's all for now. Enjoy!

[5thwheel]

That is turning out to be one handsome building.

[Allan G]

Everything looks wonderful. Especially like the pix taken from the inside looking out through the portico....Allan

[Chuck Doan]

I agree, a really fine project.