Buick’s Blog – How To Paint & Weather Paving

This how-to guide was kindly submitted by Mike in the Railway Modellers Facebook Group

Right, as promised, for those of you working on paving, a few tips on how to get them looking almost real. I’m no expert but the feedback I’ve had suggests that it’s worth sharing so here goes.

The process needs to be adapted slightly depending on whether you’re using card, or embossed plastic, mainly because too much water will ‘blow’ the card, but follow this process and you wont go far wrong.

Firstly, arm yourself with some cheap acrylic paint, and some cheap paint brushes I bought mine form The Range) but you can get them from anywhere. The colours you’ll need are light grey, dark grey, burnt umber, burnt sienna, antique yellow, black, white and marine blue. There’s no need to spend loads of money on modelling paints, and the brushes will quickly get ruined so don’t buy expensive ones!

There’s two ways to go about this and the first way will suit the card stones.

Paint the whole lot one colour – usually dark grey and once this is completely dry, take a 5mm or so wide brush and apply some black paint using a ‘dry brush’ method. If you do this correctly, you’ll get the faintest of marks across the tops of the slabs. Again, once this is dry, repeat the process with any combination of the above paints (except blue) to create tonal shades, and lastly with white to lift the colour out of the finished article.

The second way, better suited to plastic, is to paint the whole lot one colour as per the previous method, but with a lighter colour and once its dry, cover it with a ‘wash’ or dark grey / brown. Once dry, follow the dry brush process until you’re happy with the results.

If you get it right, it should look like my picture….and if you don’t, practice makes perfect.