Using acrylic house paint for model trains

[rue_d_etropal]

Notbeing a fan of air brushes I tend to only brush paint, the only exception being when I use Halfords primer aerosols , which is said to be one of the best acryllic primers around and used by many military modellers.

I used to use grey ayllic paint as a primer , hand brushed. Not sure if it was same as the Deco range but it was being sold off cheaply.

Oddly I have found grey paint adheres better than other colours. Not sure why , but when I could not get the grey paint, I switched to household white primer, which works OK but is not as good. Mind you I don't tend to clean surface as well as I should which does not help.

Now having primed surface I now use any water based paint, ususually emulsion test pots which go on very well, are cheap and can be bought locally to me. Oddly some greens are not in range , but easy to mix blue and yellow!

Emulsion paint is not as hard wearing, but then for most of my models I am not planning to handle them much.

As the emulsion paint is mostly only available in matt, if I want a shiny finish I use household acryllic varnish, which is also useful to bond transfers, and degree of gloss can be changed a little.

For brush painting, I usually add a bit of water, so the paint becomes more a stain than a paint, much thinner, and layers can be built up, so less chance of small detail being lost.

As with any act=yllic paint , it touch dries fast, but drying process continues I think for at least 24 hours. This can be useful, as a smallamount of blending can be done.

My methods are definitely not conventional, but they work for me.

I tend to use cheap paint brushes, and wash them off n jars of water I keep, building up a collection of mucky thin paint water which I then use for weathering, wet style, not dry painting for me, as it replicates the way water gets into surfaces and causes discolouration etc.