If you've been paying attention to my blog entry on the town of White Haven you know I've said on several occasions that I need to have some cars on the streets and in the driveways of some of the homes in White Haven. Sounds easy - I have a couple diecast cars (a Chevy Corsair and a Dodge Charger that my wife got me for Christmas), but the trouble is each one is quite expensive (roughly $20 per vehicle). Let's face it, I'm cheap. There's also nothing to do on those diecast cars except pull them out of their plastic case and put them on the layout. I guess you could weather them if they look too new.
I've been looking for some low cost options - and there are some out there. You can get a bunch of modern-looking sedans from a producer in China, but aside from color, they all look so similar that I don't think they would look real good. They're also too futuristic for 1976 in White Haven, PA. I stumbled onto a company that 3D prints from China (Outland Models), and they have some varieties of automobile (cars and trucks) that look like they might fit. The problem was, they're 3D-printed on gray plastic. Most cars aren't gray. Here's a look at some of them as they're sold:
One really nice thing about them is that they're also a lot cheaper than diecast cars. The two trucks you can get together for less than $6, the VW Beetle is under $4. I'd actually wanted a Beatle anyway, my father-in-law mentioned that they had their's in 1976 and (as you may recall) they own a house in my fictional town. Although their Beatle was a convertible (can't model that), I remember it's original color was light blue...
I received all of these cars on a Monday and that night tried painting with my cheap acrylics. Aside from the fact that I didn't have anything to model chrome (I'll pick up some Testor's chrome paint this weekend), they turned out pretty well.
All of them need some touchups, but the basic look is good enough for where I want to put them on the layout. One of the things that I was really fretting about were the windows on these models. How do I make the windows look realistic? Obviously I can't put clear plastic in them. The answer was to do a little research on the web - the answer came from a couple of guys that do wargaming. The best ideas came from a guy with a nickname of Lumpy:
The essence was to create ground and sky in each window by blending paint colors and then give the windows a reflective haze. You first paint each window area black. Then lay in a streak of brown in the bottom of the window, dark blue in the top of the window, and then a light blue in the middle. You then blend the colors a bit until you get something like this:
... it really works pretty well! The last step is to dip a soft brush in some white paint and remove as much paint as you can by wiping or dabbing and then drag the bristles over the window. You get the final product:
...and here's the bug out on the street.
...and I wasn't finished with bugs... Two of my friends and coworkers have ties to VW bugs. The first is a miser of the first order - Dave's mantra is "If it's free, get three!". He bought a white convertible bug many years ago and had an engine fire. Rather than junk the car he bought a new motor and a new hood cover (the engine's in the rear of a bug, so the hood's in the back). Rather than get a white one to match the rest of the car, Dave bought a cheaper orange hood which created a distinctive look around town - you always knew when Dave was around. My friend Sam (who is a meticulous guy who loves his own cars (most of which are older than me), exasperated by the orange hood cover, told Dave that he would spray bomb his hood cover for (you guessed it, FREE!!!). A couple of white spray paint cans later, and Dave was travelling in new-found style for quite a few years until he sold the bug to buy a Mustang convertible. In a weird twist of fate, Sam's daughter adopted an affection for a newer version of bug in yellow, and her grandfather bought her one as her first car. So, I present to you two new additions to the car fleet for my model railroad... gotta figure out where I want to place them.
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