Paint pen effects

I'll admit, I don't really know what I'm doing with paint pens. Obviously there are many hours of YouTube out there, but I don't have time to dig through it all, so I've read a couple of articles (sooooo much quicker than video) and dived in. 

First, we have the garden around the house. 

One challenge is to match the colours to the stills from the film of My Neighbour Totoro, which seem to change quite a bit. Then to remember that I've only seen the stage show (still looking for a DVD), and so I want a nice-looking model. It's not about authenticity. 

AK's Off White seems a reasonable base colour for the tree trunk and ground. Arguably, they should both be brown, but we are in a fantasy land. The plants are picked out in cheap pen Dark Olive, which looks really nice, but cried out for some highlights. With paint, I'd dry-brush, but that's not an option with the pens (I wonder if I could drag colour from the pen onto a brush? One to try), so I simply picked up high areas on the ground cover using the pointed end, and streaked the leaves of the tree. 

Working on a plastic base that has been primed with white, this seems to allow the colours to merge very slightly, and the effect is quite attractive, not unlike the hyperreal painting military modellers are so fond of. 

You'll notice some pen testing in the area that will be hidden under the house. These paints change colour as they dry, and I wasn't sure what they would look like in real life. 

Moving on to the house itself, the pure white walls look a bit stark, so I base-coated with AK off-white, left it to dry, then top-coated with cheap pen white. The paint is slightly translucent, so we get a nice aged effect. 

Green windows are painted first, and then many coats of white tidy up the frames. Working with a brush would be easier here and the pen points aren't nearly as sharp as I'd like. 

The roof is red, but pure cheap pen red is a bit bright. I left it to dry while pondering, then coated the tiles with AK Dunkelgelb, and wiped it down the roof immediately with my finger. Result - a nicely aged effect. Even where the paint has worn away from the edges in a couple of places looks good. Not that anyone will be looking at the roof much anyway. 
 

Cheap paint pens

I'm thinking that the CatBus would be a good project to paint entirely with acrylic paint pens. Recently, I've found them really useful - no messing around mixing paint and then cleaning up the brush. Perfect for the time-poor modeller who can see a deadline approaching. The speed the paint dries is another help here. 

To date, my tools have been from Ammo and MiG, proper modellers products, but at my club, the chaps working on the modular layout pointed me at this pack on Amazon.  They are getting on well with them, and for the price, an experiment wasn't going to hurt. 

A benefit is that this provides a lot of different colours, which may be helpful for figure painting where I need a tiny bit of colour, but am too stingy to splash out £4+ on a tinlet of Humbrol. I might love purple, but I doubt it would have gone off by the second time I opened the pot. 

The pens are normal pen size, and have a brush end, and a "pointed" one. Oddly, the brush is the more pointed of the two. Another moan (this is the internet) is that the pen doesn't say what colour it is, you are left to compare it to the back of the box and guess. 

The CatBus

 

Remember when I went to see "My Neighbour Totoro"? I quickly became obsessed with the CatBus, but not so much I'd pay £40 for a plush version that didn't look that great to me. 

Instead, I dug around the internet for a garage production model, and found this one from (appropriately enough for me) Nom Nom Figures. At just over 10cm tall, it's a nice size. There isn't room in my cabinet for anything much bigger, and this is going on display!

A few days after ordering, a modest cardboard box arrived, full of 3D printed parts, all nicely enclosed in bubblewrap. 

The printing is nice and smooth. The part fit is amazing, considering the cat curls around the roof of the house. I can't fault it. 

Time to start painting! 

GETS haul

 

Not a lot of stuff for me from GETS. There were a few purchases for work projects, but I'm still being restrained as I have so much stuff in the stash, and not enough time to build it all!

Of course, as regular readers will know, I'll buy pretty much anything Groudle Glen Railway-related, so when I saw that Saddletank Books had some bookmarks and a badge featuring "Polar Bear", they were obviously coming home with me. I don't need three bookmarks of course; a couple will be Christmas presents in a few months, an idea I like so much, I may need more. 

Better still, Pauline has promised to add "Sea Lion" to the range in the future, knowing this guarantees even more sales. 

The Warley 21st wagon turned up in a rummage box for three quid, a big drop from its original price, I seem to recall.  

And more paint pens. My stocks of these are growing, which is handy, as you'll find out later this week.  

Great Electric Train Show 2026

I don't know if this can described as a "trend", but there were several layouts this year that offered little operation at the front, replying on the fiddle yard operator being efficient and sending around a constant procession of trains. 

Instead of operation, they provided superb scenic displays. I particularly liked Penhelig, seen above. It's a halt, and very accurately, doesn't have much other railway around it, but treated as an attractive moving picture, it just works. 

I like this idea, and it's one I've pondered building in the past. You need a wide selection of trains made up, ready to be fired around the layout so the viewers aren't left waiting for some movement, but for a stock builder, that's no problem. In my head, I'd also include a couple of animated scenes to provide interest. The fun would be in the building. 

A feature that intrigues me, is this coaling stage on the layout Marley Potts & Witherwack Sidings 

Is there a prototype for this? It reminds me of the Hornby/Pola model from the 1970s that I built last year.

Layout quality overall was really high. Even Making Tracks was behaving itself on the Sunday when I visited, although Pete mentioned that the day before, one of the control boxes had released some of those bad electrical smells we all dread...

Food wasn't bad. Lunch was a very nice jacket potato with chilli and cheese, which looked a bit like the eggs in Alien. After this I really fancied something sweet, but there wasn't anything on offer, apart from bars of chocolate, so I nipped up to see the nice chaps of the Double O Gauge Association, and blagged a jam doughnut. 

Numbers looked good, but it wasn't hard to get around. Layout watching was a little challenging, because of the numbers who are filming the models, and so have to occupy a prime spot for a long while.  Grabbing a photo is one thing, long video sequences? Not so sure, especially those filming on an A4 size iPad, for whom there is a special place in hell reserved. The bit where the only model trains as N gauge GWR!

Anyway, more photos on my Flickr feed.