Coloring plaster

[doug57]

I need to know if woodland scenics pigments will work on plaster of paris.

Doug

[Track fiddler]

Hi Doug

They'll work great.  There's tutorials on that on the net.

Plaster will readily absorb that, deluted paint, colored India ink-alcohol washes and just about any other thined out liquid you want to apply.  Absorbs it all best when the plaster is completely dry.

 

 

TF

[RR_Mel]

For me the WS pigments work better for rocks used as a stain after the plaster has fully dried.

Scenery fades over time under fluorescent, incandescent and Sun light.  If you seal the rocks they can’t be touched up after fading, I learned the hard way.  No fading under LED lighting.

Mel


 
My Model Railroad   
http://melvineperry.blogspot.com/
 
Bakersfield, California
 
Turned 84 in July, aging is definitely not for wimps.

[Pauley]

RR_Mel

Scenery fades over time under fluorescent, incandescent and Sun light.  If you seal the rocks they can’t be touched up after fading, I learned the hard way.  No fading under LED lighting.

IIRC, Woodland Scenics recommends a spray of Scenic Cement after the color has dried to prevent fading. I can't really comment on that, since my layouts are in relatively subdued indoor lighting, and I don't think I would ever notice a fading problem anyway.

[RR_Mel]

I takes time to fade.  My layout is in our garage and I installed five double bulb 8’ fluorescent fixtures so I could see all the nooks and crannies.  Ten years after putting down my WS flocking and rock staining pretty much all the color was washed out.  The flocking was easy but I had to replace the sealed rocks.  This time I didn’t seal the plaster of Paris rocks.  Another ten years and everything was washed out again but this time I was able to re-stain the rocks.

I replaced the fluorescent lighting with LED lighting and now almost eight years later all the scenery still looks great, no sign of fading.

I’ve often wondered what effect it had on my bald head.   

Mel


 
My Model Railroad   
http://melvineperry.blogspot.com/
 
Bakersfield, California
 
Turned 84 in July, aging is definitely not for wimps.

[doctorwayne]

I bought a gallon of cheap dirt-coloured interior latex paint to paint my layout's Durabond-on-aluminum-screen landforms, but found it tiring to apply with a 4" brush. 
Instead, I dumped some of the paint into a plastic ice cream container, then added an equal amount of water...the thinned colour became very easy to apply, and soaked into the Durabond quickly.  I've still got more than a half-gallon of it left.
Woodland Scenics offers some good stuff, but they also get good money for it too.  The gallon of paint was less than ten bucks.

Wayne

 

[MisterBeasley]

I cast the "cement" roadways around my tannery with Hydrocal.  The castings came out great but I was kind of taken aback by the WS pigment I used.  For a couple of square feet of the casting, I needed two packages of the pigment and four probably would have looked better.

[Pruitt]

Just go to a craft store (Hobby Lobby, Michaels, etc. - or even WalMart) and buy acrylic paints and mix them in with the plaster. The cost starts at about half of what the Woodland Scenics products cost - even before shipping.

Apple barrel 2 oz. paints at WalMart are $.50 (when did the cents sign on keyboards go away? Or were they just ever on typewriters? But I digress). There is a huge range of colors. And who isn't near a WalMart?

Powdered tempera paints also work great, and cost probably less than a tenth of what Woodland Scenics charges for their bottles of pigments. The actual cost is about 25% of WS's by weight, but an ounce of dry pigment goes a lot farther than an ounce of wet pigment, because you're paying for the water in the wet pigment.

[gmpullman]

I've added some tube acrylics to my plaster in the past but found that if I add enough to get the coloration I wanted that the plaster didn't seem to cure as good as I was expecting.

Has anyone tried actual concrete dye?

https://www.homedepot.com/p/NewLook-0-5-lb-Dark-Brown-Fade-Resistant-Cement-Color-CC8OZ102/203858632?MERCH=REC-_-pipsem-_-203858636-_-203858632-_-N&

Seems like it would do the trick and doesn't look all that expensive.

https://www.homedepot.com/b/Building-Materials-Concrete-Cement-Masonry-Decorative-Concrete-Concrete-Colorants/N-5yc1vZcdp9

 

Regards, Ed

[mobilman44]

Over many years I've tried all kinds of methods to color plaster.  I've mixed dry colors, latex paint, and India inks with the plaster mix, and painted finished plaster formations with acrylics, latex, and india inks as well.  From the various attempts, which had different degrees of success, I quickly learned two things.

The first was learned on the large mountain tunnels of a late 1950s Lionel layout.  When you paint the finished white plaster and cover with "ground cover", it looks fine.  But, any time something hits or scratches that area, you will end up with a bright white and very obvious result. 

From the above, I learned to mix color (usually a brown) with the plaster so that any "hits" would not be readily apparent.

The second thing I learned (the hard way of course) was on the first room filling HO layout I built in the mid '90s.  I had a raised second level, with rock and cliffs spanning that level to the base - literally around the entire layout (15x11).  I had colored the plaster mix, and then using acrylics painted the resulting rock formations and walls.  What I didn't realize (read all about it later on in MR) was that the paints dry darker than when they are first applied. 

So I ended up with very dark brown/grey rock surfaces, that IMO were more depressing than impressive.  And over the 12 year life of the layout I tried to lighten them, but was just never successful.  To paraphrase Emeril, "you can always add color, but you can't take it away".

ENJOY!