I bought a set of Hansa Sysytems cobblestones, molded in dark gray plastic. How to paint or otherwise finish them properly? Thanks.

Tom;

Hi! Not that I have ever even seen a scale cobblestone kit - but I have built from scratch a cobble road...

So how does this "kit"? look? Are the "stones" separate and you have to individually set them, just like as if you were building a real cobblestone road, or is it set of multi-stone "tiles" or puzzle-pieces, or is it some sort of 1-piece sculpted roadway? "System" suggests the first option, to me!...

Maybe something from the following will help you:

I scratched a 1/35 "paver-block" road back ca 1973 - based on the fired paver-road outside my door at the time...

I made small "paver" pellets from unfired ceramic clay. Let them dry. Dipped them in thinned tempura paints in lots to get some color variation (mid - darker grays mixed with browns). Let them fully dry, and mounted (set) them into a thin, tinted plaster base mud (added tempura to make a light "earth-color" plaster). I let the whole mass dry well, and sealed it with a very thin wash of dilute tinted PVA (this serves to fill in some drying cracks and also keep stones set in the plaster). I then applied a couple of dilute washes of "light earth - colors" tempura to create a dusty-gray color down in the cracks between stones (which were all pretty mid - to -darker shades of gray-brown). (The PVA gave the stones a smoother surface, so most of the wash settled into the cracks). I finished this with a spray of Dull-cote to finally seal and matt things. Were I doing this today, I would follow up with some dusting with chalks and pigments, with maybe some effort to rub off the dust on the top surfaces of stones.

You could easily do something like this using matt acryl or enamels, IF you have loose styrene or resin stones: stick them onto a surface like gobs of small tank road-wheels and spray-paint them in lots in colors of "stone" of the type you want (grays, browns, slatey-gray colors, etc.). A rattle-can would work well for this. Once painted, set them into a plaster base (or whatever your kit suggests or specifies). Let it dry. I would maybe coat the assembled road with semi-matted "Future" floor treatment (mix in a little Tamiya flat base to reduce the Future shine...) - this will seal the road and give the stones a little surface "polish". Follow up with a diluted matt wash of earth-tones into the cracks and maybe some pigments or chalk to weather the top. Sounds sort of like a big flat tank!

IF your "road" is actually a cast mosaic, you might have to do some more-careful selective spraying of colors onto groups or individual stones in the mosaic to get the likely color variation. The washes to tint into the cracks would be the same, as would matted-Future sealing and application of pigments and / or chalks to dust things up a bit.

The BIG decision will be to select the stone color you want to get - IF you can, go look at a cobble road, or look at some modern color pics of same - Limestones are light tannish-grays, basalts and similar hard "river / field stones" are dark grays, greenish or bluish grays, etc. Fired pavers are deeper red-browns with plenty of gray and black mixed in. IF this is in "the Med", you probably want the limestones... the dust will be light earth colors. IF you have "missing cobbles" - the exposed bedding will likely be the prevailing "earth" or sand colors. IF you want ground-up leaf duff (often on roads...) you can add this with darker brown chalks. "Wet" will be darker than "dry".

Good luck! Sounds like fun and I bet it'll come out pretty cool!

Bob

They're individual pieces. A necessity when I'm building a town square with a statue stand in the center, and when the square was designed centirues before motorized traffic.

Thanks fo the info, it's a great help. I'll be using cobblestones elsewhere eventually.

Hi Tom. See my thread on the base for the Pz.Kpfw III here.
I like to get good contrast between the differnt stone colours, and then spray filters until it unifies again.
Ive not seen to much of the Hansa systems, but I´d imagine the stone work is "too perfect" to get the right feeling for old and especially damaged buildings and cobblestones. Just my tupence worth!!