Painting the Building


I used Poly-Scale paints: SCL Hopper Beige for the window sills, mortar, and wall caps, Boxcar Red as a base color for the bricks, MEC Pine Tree Green for metal trim, Signal Green for wood trim, and Reefer Gray for the floor.  I used Engine Black and Grimy Black for weathering.

I painted the framing of the clear plastic windows by brushing a heavy coat of paint onto the flat side of a Pink Pearl eraser, then pressing the windows down on the eraser while looking through the window to watch the progress.  It took two coats and a lot of paint, but the windows came out fine.

For the outside walls, I wanted the appearance of common brick, which is not one color, but has large blotches of colors ranging from buff through oxide red to almost black.  Hand-coloring individual bricks to achieve this effect was out of the question.  I finally developed a spatter painting technique to give me what I wanted.

Once you have the bricks done the way you want them, apply mortar, and paint the side and top edges of the door and window openings with your metal trim color, to simulate frames.  Paint the window sills and wall caps a cement or limestone color.

Install the window and skylight glazing, then weather the roof, walls, and wall caps with grimy black in an airbrush,  Don't forget the parts of the wall that face the roof.  While you're at it, weather the floor too.  If you want to get fancy about it, use lighter weathering in the high-traffic areas.  In places this dirty, traffic helps keep the floor clean.

I found out after final assembly, when it was too late to do a good job of it, that the insides of the walls also needed painting.  The flanges of the clear plastic windows show white where the glue crazed them, and the brick material I used to fill in the doorways was a different color than the rest of the walls, as were various parts of the working doors.  Even with a coat of grime, the windows and skylight showed the multitude of colors inside.

When you paint the interior, may I suggest a different color for the lower five or six feet of walls and columns.  This "false horizon" pattern is widely used in industrial buildings.

A few other ideas I could have incorporated but didn't:


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