Topic: Scenery
Guess what? The lost is found. This entry disappeared not into a black hole, but perhaps a Lycos wormhole and it ended up in an earlier time. Even though the editing date clearly appeared as the year 2007, it was posted to the year 2002. Now that was before I even started this journal. For other purposes I happened to be looking back through all of my posts and low there it was, back before the begining.
Awhile back I described the steps I used to add color to rock castings along a a small cut in the Missouri portion of the layout. I use the same methods for coloring the Colorado mountain areas but it may be easier to see with these larger surfaces. Coloring rocks is one of the most fun parts about scenery, but perhaps also one of the most challenging. It takes a bit of an eye for color, however, if you spend some time looking at real rocks and do a bit of analysis of the color you can begin developing that eye for color. One thing you will notice is, aside from gemstones, the color of most rocks is on the drab side. The colors are relatively subtle and often have a lot of white in them. The coloration is seldom uniform. The color of a rock is often the result of particles of several colors which produce an overall impression of a single color. We are never going to perfectly reproduce all of the subtle variations of color in a rock, but we can use techniques to produce a depth and complexity to the color of our castings which heighten the impression that we are looking at real rocks.
I always have a minimum of four steps in coloring any rock formation. I begin with black. My black is dry powder tempera paint which you can find in stores marketing teachers' supplies. I will then apply at least two colors of acrylic paint. I use the paint available in tubes from any art or craft supply store. I purchase the most inexpensive paint available. You're not going to be painting a personal version of the Mona Lisa and the cheap paint will do just fine. I don't use the liquid acrylic paints so popular at Walmart as I don't feel I have as much control with them as with the tube paints. When I say I use "two colors" I may not be using two entirely different colors, but merely two different tints of the same color. The final step, no matter how many intermediary colors have been applied, is to bleach the colors with an overall very thin application of white.
I apply the black tempera paint dry with a two inch brush. I apply it much as might an old woman powdering her face trying to cover up those age spots, i.e., heavy. This is a dry, dusty process and black powder floats everywhere. I recommend using a face mask to avoid inhaling this stuff. Be really vigorous with your brush working the powder into every nook, cranny, and surface. Don't forget the underside of your rocks! When finished, you're going to have a fair amount of powder which didn't adhere to your castings and has settled on any flat surface below your rocks. Vacume up this left over powder; it is waste. Failing to vacuum the left over powder is going to mean big puddles of black paint after the next step in the process. 
The next step is to rinse the entire area with water from a spray bottle. The more water you spray on the rocks, the less black color will remain. If you want dark, moody mountains use only a little spray. If your mountain is to have a lighter color, spray with more water. The spray turns the powder to a black liquid which can settle into the cracks and details of your rock casting. The black will also adhere more to those surfaces which are rough. This procedure introduces the first variations in coloration and will influence each succeeding color application. I call this step "shading". It is roughly equivalent to the "shadowing" which others do with a black ink wash as their final step in coloring. I believe applying the black at the beginning of the process will result in modifying the shade of colors applied later without covering up those colors.
In technical terms, a "shade" is the color which results when a colored pigment is added to black. The relative proportions of black and colored pigments determines if the shade is darker or lighter. Likewise, a "tint" is the result of the colored pigment being added to white. So the following steps in the process are adding tints to the color of the castings. It is more usual to create "tints" rather than "shades" due to the presence of white in so many rocks and to the fact that the illumination of our layouts is many times less intense than that of sunlight illuminating real life scenery. For this mountain I chose to apply tints of burnt umber, yellow ocher, raw umber. burnt sienna, and raw sienna. The following photos show the results after application of each tint in succession.
The addition of each color may produce a subtle or a dramatic change, but each is adding to the depth and complexity of the overall color. The final color I add is a thinned white applied with a dry brush technique. I squeeze some of the the white acrylic onto my palette. With my brush quite wet I draw a bit of this paint out. Then I stroke the brush on a dry piece of paper to remove some of the paint. This creates what is called a "dry brush" with which I then start brushing the rock castings in a downward motion. It is important to use only downward strokes because you want to avoid leaving white paint on the undersides of the rocks. This simulates the effect of sunlight which comes from above. I start with light strokes followed by more vigorous ones to stretch the paint out on the surface as a thin film. It requires some practice before you will get the right results. The goal is to leave only enough white paint to create a very light haze on the rock castings without significantly changing the underlying color of the rocks. This haze gives the rocks a dry, dusty, and sun-bleached appearance. The haze reflects the incandescent lights I use for layout lighting and creates highlights on the rocks and enhances the shadows when you view the rocks at an angle from the light source. So that's how I colored that mountain.
