Creating Realistic Stone Walls on Your Layout

People think of concrete as a recent building material, but the use of poured concrete actually goes back as early as 1840. By the 1890s, poured concrete was in common use by railroads for retaining walls and bridge abutments. So almost any model railroad can benefit from use of these materials. A simple way to build a concrete item is to use a styrene. Here, for example, we have a piece of primed styrene, again, primed with inexpensive discount store primers, which we will use, and we will make to look like a concrete wall. The first step to make this look like concrete is to add a texture. We will take gesso, which is an art supply, it's actually ground up marble with acrylic medium, and by taking a stiff brush, we will stipple a coat on. There's no need to be neat, we want to kind of do it kind of messily so we will get a texture. If little areas show through and do not get colored, that is fine too. Now we need coloring. Concrete color varies by many things. It varies by the light it's in, it varies by the season, it varies by the direction it is facing, it varies by the quarry where the sand and stone was come from. So almost any color you'd think that resembles concrete will be just fine. In this case, I have a tan color I like, and I will again stipple a coat with a stiff brush onto the primed surface. It's not important to be real neat. We can do the entire wall in a matter of a few minutes. We have a finished wall, and if I've missed a few spots and there are a few bumps, that will only add to the character. We're not trying to make a brand new wall that has been just finished last year, we're talking about a wall that was built when the railroad rebuilt itself in about the 1920s. The next step, to add some discoloring, I have used a wash, which is really just a thin application of paint of a yellow ochre, and while it was wet, I streaked some rust color onto it to add rusting that comes out from imperfections in the materials. As a final step, I have weathered the wall with some watercolor washes, blacks and browns and grays until it looks pretty old. In this case, I have added some little weep holes with streaking, and I have added some form lines and cracks with a pencil and a ruler. As you can see, it is quite easy to turn a piece of styrene into an old concrete wall. Stone and concrete are both masonry, except stone has a much greater variety of color, but we can use similar methods to weather them both. For example, here is a injection molded piece of a stone wall, looks like a shiny piece of plastic. As usual, I find it easier to spray paint the sides and prime them so I have a good base color. Since masonry is masonry, a coat of gesso gives it a texture. Try to be careful not to get too much gesso into the mortar lines. That can be scraped out while wet very easily. In this case, I've taken several warm grays and I've just stipple coated, stipple coated a variety of color to simulate stone. It looks kind of messy now, and uneven. I've also painted the doors and windows and used a brown stone for the trim. Another great thing you can do is to highlight dark colors with a thin wash of white watercolor. Now that this wash is dry, I can begin to weather everything at the same time. I will take some watercolor paint, and I will make a thin glaze of watercolor and just start to apply it over everything. It looks kind of messy now. Watercolor just by spreading it tends to spread and form into the cracks more so than it does on the surface. So we're starting to just fill in the cracks. This tends to be a very imprecise method. You just slobber it on, and since it washes off, you don't worry too much about what happens. Okay, we've applied a brown wash to this piece. Here we have one that the brown wash wash is complete. I usually use a thin black overcoat just to add a highlight at the end. Again, there's no need to be neat, and considering using other colors. I've seen red mortar, green mortar, mortar of almost any color you could imagine. Little black just kind of seems to bring out a little more depth. If it looks kind of messy now, it's not to worry. I often apply it more heavily than I should, because the final step is to take a damp towel and just pick up the paint off the surface. This makes the highlights on the stone look a little brighter and makes the darks look a little darker, and we've transformed this piece of styrene into a realistic looking stone wall.