Digital Paint Concepts For Freelanced Railroads

[METRO]

When it comes to color matching for printed decals, I found that the best way to do it is to allow as much ink as it will give in the printer settings.

Thankfully I've never had to print yellow onto maroon, but I've had a couple problems matching the color of the decals to the color of paint.

On my Selenian Lines commuter units, the lettering is in the same tone as much of the paint (B&O Dark Blue) basically I used trial and error for a while. One of the things I learned early was that screen calibration is very importaint as well.

For doing work, I like a slightly blue tinted screen on my computer, however leaving it that way left my decals off tone by quite a bit.

I eventually figured out the white backround idea, but matching the lettering to the paint was still hard, and just took lots of very small tweaking of colorations within Photoshop.

~Astral

*edit* On my MOW equipment and switchers I just cheated and bought B&O freight units, painted out the gold striping with gray and redid the lettering in gray. That was much easier. hehe

[Wdlgln005]

This is part of the future for digital model railroading. THe next step will be to print decals based on your drawings. Light colors (yellow) will need a white background to get it to come out correctly. On another site, the modeler used his computer & a ALPS printer to do Tennessee Central decals. THe trick was to get the yellow to come out on the maroon carbody. I'd like to hear if you had similar experience? I'd like to see how you were able to match paint color with what you intended?

[METRO]

I've reciently started painting my rolling stock for my freelanced commuter line. Mostly it's been P42s, PA-1s and lots of commuter coaches.

While I was developing the paint scheme I downloaded 1:55 drawings of each unit from PaintShop.Railfan.Net and then used Adobe Photoshop to scale them to HO. I then used the program to work out which paint job I liked the best ( I think I must have tried at least ten different options)

But the real help came in that I could print out the drawing and use it to make a template for when I painted the units.

Has anyone else used anything like this for their freelanced lines? I'd be interested in making a tutorial for how to go about it.

Anyways, the paint job that I settled on was inspired by the colors of the Mo-Pac Eagles and B&O gen1 Freight hood units. With a pattern simmilar to the old LIRR commuter locomotves.

Tell me what you think:


~METRO