For those who don’t know Craig has 27 children all boys.
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Round 1 of painting in.
After school my oldest helped me mix some paint colors and I airbrushed the darker color while he used the hairdryer to speed dry the paint for me.
It was Awana night so the wife and the 2 oldest left after dinner leaving me with the 2 yld…
Well he felt asleep on the couch without Dad while I was putting dishes and dinner away!
So I got 2 hours of airbrushing in.
These are the two colors I used. The darker color was actually from my paint stash as the color I picked up was way to purple looking.
I got the darker base coat all done and masked. I used what is called a “soft mask” as I didn’t get every edge sealed. By keeping the airbrush to a 90° to the mask it prevents a lot of overspray issues. Once I weather it (after MIK) I don’t think the oversprsy will be noticeable.
The lighter color is taking a lot more coats. You can clearly see the soft lines I’ve been making with this photo. I’m trying to get the right color up to the bracket bottom, then I’ll flip the building upsidedown and do the rest.
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I bought those same acrylics bottles from Walmart, same brand and color. And Awana night, wow, that brings back memories.
I feel an acrylic Awana bond with you Craig! But it doesn’t work on ABS, sorry.
PS: If Jon and I can finish our models, YOU can as well.
PPS: It’s looking GREAT, Dude!
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Nothing sticks to ABS. 
I don’t know who names paint colors but there’s some interesting names. Almost as good as crayons.
The boys love Awana and our youngest gets old enough to join Mom at Cubbies next year as Mom is one of the leaders. I’ll probably end up volunteering as well.
I might be able to pull it off if I can get the last details done. I think the painting is going to take the longest as it has so much coverage. I was going to make the loading dock out of wood but now I’m thinking about going with plastic. It will glue a lot faster and I can make up some posts with flat stock. I’m guessing the posts are 12x12 or something stout like that.
This light brown color is taking a lot of coats of light layering to get it to change from primer grey to the proper color. Thank goodness for a hairdryer to speed up the drying process. And all these awkward angles of getting in between the roof brackets is also taking time. 
Mr Impatient is getting impatient waiting for slow color changes…
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Not that it’s related to the MIK build, but last night I made a Facebook group for my railroad.
That doesn’t mean I won’t post here anymore, but you might get slightly more updates if you want to follow along. I just felt I needed a place to organize all my thoughts, ideas, and projects.
Or just ignore this incredibly anal modeler and continue to hold your breath to see if he will finish the MIK build or not…
Cool. Years ago, when I created my railroad’s Facebook Page set it up as a business page, rather than a personal page which really limits the reach unless you pay for distribution of posts 
I would change it to a personal page, but Facebook won’t do it for me and if I do it myself I will loose all my 786 followers. My page is facebook.com/cvsry
Got to love how open and well run Facebook has become! I guess you can message all 168 people and let them know of the change.
Another page I follow had the one Administrator pass away, their brother was also on the page but didn’t know the password, so it has slowly become a spam page. Sad
Hey I got 49 members. Quit saying I’ve got more. Those 49 people are crazy to follow me… and I know at least a few of them are silly enough to post on LSC as well. 
Oops edit that I’m up to 50 as I type this. Ha ha.
Oh and it’s it a popularity contest I’m losing for sure. Shoot some of my “friends” haven’t even joined my group. And they think they are my friend. Ha ha suckers…
I’ve still got 24 hours left and I made some decent progress this evening.
Got the painting done including a round a light weathering.
Then finished the roof (only major expense at $22 so far).
Then I whipped out the loading dock out of styrene.
Need primer and paint but that will go quick.
Last two items I can think of are the roof access ladder and the chimneys. The ladder I can build with styrene but the chimneys need a little more thinking. I could try and resin print them (could be an epic failure or great success but I haven’t tried printing anything yet).
I don’t have any blacken it for the brass train order stand so I need to order some of that so I’ll leave that detail off for now.
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Craig,
Your ability to manage detail and time is amazing!
Eric
Styrene helps with the time management part. I think it took me 15 minutes tops to make the loading dock due to super quick glue aka MEK… That same dock in wood would still be clamped.
Styrene is pretty easy to work with and once you learn a few methods it’s easy to adapt. I added wood grain with a razor saw and 60 grit sandpaper. I forgot to do the posts before I glued them but the rest of the pieces got a quick swipe of the razor saw for some wood grain texture.
Looks great. Your technique for painting the color change line worked perfectly. I would have tried to get the tape to comply with all the battens resulting in a miserable fail. I will remember the ‘tape shadow’ when I spray paint at work.
I never did break out my air brush. I like using it, but hate the clean-up. At work I use solvent based paint whenever possible because gun clean up is so much easier. At home I don’t have an indoor space where I can spray anything other than acrylics.
Jon
So a hard mask ie pressing down tape will get you the best results. What I do normally is spray the base coat over the tape so that if any paint bleeds ( which it will) it bleeds via the correct color. Then I paint color #2.
A soft mask ( this term I learned for a FB airbrush group) is a term used when you mask something but don’t want a hard line but rather want to feather colors together. Hold a piece of paper a few inches away and spray at 90° you’ll get some overspray but it will blend in as it “fades”.
What I did for this building was tape like a hard mask but only did the tops of the battens. I got overspray like I expected on the board sections of B&B, but once I gave the building a wash of black for a base layer of weathering it just about disappeared.
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I only paint acrylics as well Jon. I don’t spend much time cleaning my airbrush. It helps that I have a gravity feed but it takes me 30 seconds tops.
- Wipe out color cup with rag.
- Fill with acrylic thinner/water. I make some homebrew thinner from a MRH article
- Spray out thinner.
- Loosen needle and clean bottom of color cup with a q tip. Reset needle ( I store my needle slightly inside so that I don’t bend it on accident).
Sometimes I skip step 4…
Source for blacken it?
Is this it?
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Its nice and foggy this morning so I snuck out before church and grabbed a few artsy, fartsy shots…
This angle could produce some interesting photos if I edited/cropped them a bit.
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The gravity cup style definitely speeds the cleaning process. I have a bottom suction feed with a jar. Nice that I can have several jars mixed and ready to spray, but more work to clean.
EDIT to add that looks great outdoors!
Looking fantastic, Craig.
Your fog effects are cool.
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The fog really helped hide some of the neighborhood. I really like the last one the best. For sure motivating me to keep working on the railroad. And now I can look out the kitchen window and see something on the layout vs a slab of sand and tracks.