New handout on weathering

Six years or seven ago, Richard Hendrickson and I put together a clinic with the title, “Weathering Transition-era Freight Cars.” I have organized a new version to modernize and update that clinic (it will be presented this week at Cocoa Beach and, later, at other meetings). But the point of the clinic remains the same. Making freight car models more or less weathered and dirty, as appropriate for each case, is essential for prototypical realism. The clinic emphasizes that there are a wide range of techniques for weathering, and to a significant extent, these are summarized in the Reference Pages shown as links at the top right of this blog page.
     Several quite different approaches, all of which work very well, are presented and illustrated in the reference pages, and are given updated illustrations in the clinic. These can be used singly or together, and viewers were encouraged to develop their own combination of techniques for weathering models realistically. The present blog post is intended to guide readers to past posts in this blog about the content of the clinic (other than the Reference Pages).
      One of the techniques explored in more depth in the new clinic is the use of artist’s colored pencils, both for varying individual board colors in wood-sheathed cars, car floors, or wood running boards, but also for overall weathering of entire cars. A recent post on the basic approach with these pencils is at this link: http://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2017/12/artists-colored-pencils-for-modeling.html . An earlier post about just the running board aspect is here:  http://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2016/01/running-boards-part-2.html .
     The original clinic had an abbreviated handout, just a single page, collecting together the various tools and materials illustrated in the clinic. In light of the various changes in the current clinic, that handout has been edited and updated. Here is the new single-page handout, as an image you can read here (you can click to enlarge it) or download from: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1KFYPIuSCi1AUDw43Oaw_JqM7d7fnZk9h/view?usp=sharing .

     Last summer, I wrote a post about the very interesting rust decals from Weathering Solutions. This post can be found at: http://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2017/07/using-weathering-solutions-decals.html . These are mostly suitable for much more modern rolling stock, but some sheets of the decals are quite usable, as I showed in the blog post just cited.
     I hope these brief update comments help guide understanding of weathering approaches, while also serving to make available a handout (and some links to relevant blog posts of the past) for this new clinic.
Tony Thompson