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Make your own realistic wood

Step 4 “Paint”

Plastic will stay plastic when you are not able to paint it in a convincing way. Without the next step the fence will remain a plastic fence. With this step it is extremely easy to make a realistic finish in only a minimum of steps. The secret lies in thinning the paint. I mixed 3 Humbrol colours to eventually get the unvarnished weathered wood… Actually just a cheap fence.
I used a light (wood) brown, Olive drab and panzergray. This are not colours I use every time I make wood. Mother nature offers you a gazillion colours to choose from. I mixed the three colours and thinned them with turpentine from the DIY store. Then with a big brush I painted the diluted paint onto the white plastic. Because it is thinned the paint will go into the deeper parts of the plastic and the higher parts will get a sort of instant highlight….. An effect that looks really nice. By the way make sure that the turpentine you use for thinning the paint is “old”, so used, preferably a couple of times because this is how you get the nice colour variations. Just let it cure a bit ( a process that goes faster due to the turpentine and then on to the next

Step 5 “small details”

Take some black paint. Dilute it and do some pinwashes in the nailholes. Then dilute some rustcoloured paint and do the same in the nailholes, Here you can paint around the nailholes on the wood too to make the impression the rust soaked into the wood. I did some bird dropping on my fence too… The fence stays outside and such things happen there. A little dot of panzergrey and a line of white painted in a little angle to show it is dropped in flight
Ok this are the 4 steps that you will need to take to go from styrene to realistic looking wood. Personally I think working with plastic gives you more control, in assembly and in painting. But above that it is a fast technique. The fence I made for this article was only an hour of work from start to the paintjob. So in a short time you have something really nice to put in the background of your diorama’s. Bigger projects are no problem with this technique. Another thing I learned using this is working the toolhandles of the tools on your vehicle with finer grit sanding paper will add a great effect when you paint them

I made pictures of the fence on a little groundwork and some pictures of other finishes I had with this technique.