Hi Guys

I am hoping that some of you may be able to help me out, i am building a Mini Art building(village road with ruined house) and i am after some advice/tips!

What i would like to know is regarding painting the stone walls that are in the kit, i dont know which is the best paint colours for painting stone work/walls etc, and i was after some help in which paints would be best and to the colours themselves.

I normally use Humbrol and Vallejo paints, can someone tell me which of these would be best and what colours would be best to use?

Thanks
Tom

I've just used craft store hobby paint for buildings and cobble stone. Here at least the colour selection is incredibly vast and you're sure to find something usable right off the shelf. Depending on the colour they usually have a half dozen to a dozen different shades, just bring along your box art. As a nice side bonus you get basically 4 times the volume of Vallejo for 3/4's the price. I wouldn't use it on a tank or figure per say, but for diorama stuff it's aces.

Otherwise all I can say is make sure that you vary the colour of individual bricks slightly. I'm not saying paint every one a different colour, but mix it up a bit as aged masonry is rarely that consistent.

Best of luck.

Personally speaking I like doing stonework as there is no real right or wrong way to do it because it all varies so much in real life. There's lots of possibilities.

I would say Vallejo and Andrea Model Color are your best bets for this kind of work. Humbrol would work well too but the drying time for those is longer.

My advice would be to look at examples first, pictures of the real thing, and if possible pictures from the period you are modelling. For stones and concrete I get a lot of grey Vallejo colors together and usually paint an undercoat of a mid-grey before picking out individual stones and areas with lighter and darker colors at random. Then I mix these greys with darker colors and wash it into the crevices (again the color doesn't have to be constantly the same color and it doesn't have to go everywhere). Then with lighter greys I go in for some drybrushing, again at random wherever you think it should go. Remember to stop every now and them and take a good look to see how things are progressing.

Then you can use enamel or oil washes to dirty things up (or not as the case may be, depends on what you want) and perhaps some pigments to give a sense of dried dirt etc.

Hope this helps.

KARL187

Thanks guys, i think it may be a case of trial and error, but i will definitely be trying out the advice you have given me.

Thanks
Tom

"Realistic model buildings" from Marcus Nicholls (DVD) has quite a bit of material on painting including a stone farmhouse that has a base color and different colored stones in the structure etc. Well worth the price of 16€ that Amazon asks for it.

A nice touch is putting some vegetation - ground foam for moss, bits of static grass, and other small bits of dried flowers, etc, here and there between the stones.

Hi Biggles
Good suggestion, ive just been out and bought a few bits and bobs.
Thanks for that!

Afraid I have to throw in my usual question here: what kind of stone? There's a huge variety of colours and types, depending on where the building is. Stone is generally too heavy to carry long distances (except for really top-end buildings) so it's very local. Just in the UK you have red, yellow, all shades of brown, and grey that varies from near-black to near-white. Then, the type of rock determines how it can be cut and dressed and so determines the shapes of the stones that can be used.

You'll want to check what style of building it is (styles vary with location too) and the type of stonework. That will get you a lot closer to where it can be used, and then you can check round the Interweb for reference pictures.

Sorry to bore on about this (again!) but it does honk me off slightly when we foster the impression that a continent two thousand miles by eighteen hundred is entirely uniform from one end to the other ...

You should take a look at the guides on Miniarts own site. Their step by step assembly and painting guides are brilliant
http://miniart-models.com/

Hi

You are right id not thought of the area or the country of origin of the stone, my model is the Mini Art village road with house ruin.

You can see the stone work on the building and on the small wall at the front, but i have also decided to do the Mini Art garage and i was going to a scene in France.

So any suggestions on what colour the stone work would be in, would be of benefit to myself!

Tom

You can do a virtual tour of the Normandy area with Google Earth and note the style and coloration of the local buildings along the main roads covered by Google Earth. Some of the older stone farm buildings still show signs of repairs and alterations most likely due to WWll battle damage. This is a great way of touring without leaving your armchair. Of course you are confined to the main roads and unfortunatly cannot turn off into random bocage country.