Painting the yard office part 1

Yesterday, I was concerned that the bricks on the Ratio Yard Office kit weren't prominent enough for me to use the pencil crayon technique to colour them.

As you can see, I was (happily) wrong about this. A coat of Humbrol 121 for the mortar followed by a good rubbing with 3 shades of brown has done the job. It is important to sharpen the crayons to get them in to the nooks and crannies when doing this. I often file the point to look like the front end of a duck billed platypus as this works well.

On the roof I'm trying a little experiment. I've never been entirely happy with my slate painting so having read the appropriate section from "The Art of Weathering", I'm going to do it "properly".

So far, the roof has had a coat of Humbrol 66 and then individual tiles are picked out with a mix of this and number 27. I put a couple of splodges of each on a bit of plastic (ironically the back of a scrap piece of Wills tiles) and mix then with the brush to get varying amounts of each.

Despite care, the effect is a bit strong at the moment so I had to paint a lot of tiles to avoid it looking like only odd ones had been coloured. Hopefully the next stage will calm things down a bit.