Greetings, I purchased 6 mostly white Atlas shorty / beer can tank cars. I'll be giving these to Lady Grandure so she and her 21yo and 24yo daughters can mark up. I'm not putting any limits on what they do. It can be flowers, trash or truly anything. I am open to suggestions on what suggestions to make for what non-paint / brush tools to use. I intend to send "sharpie" markers but was wondering what other easy to use components / implements might be applied. Thanks in advance.
Have you thought about graffiti decals. These folks have a number of different sheets. http://www.microscale.com/Merchant2...0-1139&Category_Code=GRAFFITI&Product_Count=5
Give em some NEW ( sharper point ) mutiple color sharpies and an optivisor...let em go to town :thumbs_up::tb-cool:
Sharpies on plastic can run. And will run if you spray on any Dullcote or varnish! The best pens to use are ones with archival quality ink, like Micron Art. The .005 ones are superb! You can get coloured sets at Michaels or A.C.Moore with their weekly coupon, or through Amazon. http://www.amazon.com/Sakura-Pigma-...WMBK/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1328483826&sr=8-4 Be careful handling to avoid smudges til the ink fully sets. That can take a few days on a very glossy surface.
I believe Blair Line also makes graffiti decals. I've something like 18 sets remaining in my inventory of stuff. Somewhere. I've done n Atlas N Scale boxcar and an Atlas 2 by covered hopper. TrainBoard member t-bone also did a couple of Trainworx N Scale coal hoppers for me some time back.
Keith, any chance you could post a few pics of how they look once applied? I've seen so many different sets available, but it's hard to see it looking as good as the real thing Thanks!
Let me hunt down a BN boxcar I did and see if I cn get photos of it later. I'm in some rather nasty pain right now. So, I want to avoid walking/standing for a while. Should be OK in a while. Another nasty flare up of left ankle area, because of blood clot/pulmonary embolism a bit over 3 years ago. Out of work for another week as well. Anyway, I'll see what I can do.
If you are not afraid to make your own decals, try these. http://www.nscalelimited.com/2011/07/13/printable-graffiti-tags/ Instead of drawing directly on the car draw on clear decal paper. Then the mistakes are not fatal.
An Atlas N Scale 50' plugdoor boxcar, with Blair Line graffiti decals added. A single decal Same car, with 2-3 decals applied Decal shine can be seen. However, that should disappear with a shot of dullcoat and some weathering. I just never got any farther than this. Now, I guess I'm gonna have to finish the project! I've got another week off work, for medical necessity.
I'm guessing I didn't post very well. Thank you for the ideas and links to various decals. My hope is to involve her daughters in a simple way. They can write "Steve's Great" or "Grey One XUSES", (they are good girls like their mother). Thank you! That will be very helpful. There is an A C Moore at the plaza where I get my lumber and such. I'll post results in a month or so.
I met a guy this weekend who used sharpies and colored pencils on his cars. They looked great. I think the colored pencil is a great idea, because it isn't quite as bold as a sharpie. I let my kids go to town on a couple of cars with some sharpies, they looked pretty cool.
We were talking about this on Trainboard Groups, Freight Car and Intermodal Detailers, and kind of decided that free-hand grafitti is just one of those things that can't really be done well in N scale. The exception being large simple tags on flat surfaces. In HO, you can do it. In N, you can't get fine enough lines and the slower you go to be careful, the more jittery the line. The faster you go, the thicker the line and the greater chance of big mistakes. Decals, often with a bit of touch-up, seem to be the way to go (which is unfortunate as the selection is limited). There are no gel pens out there that make a really fine white line. I'm talking about "serious" tagging on your precious detailed models here. It's one of the heartaches of N scale to me, the inability to replicate grafitti I see in real life.
There are plenty of fonts out there to make your own decals. A laser printer will give you more opaque colors than an inkjet. But the inkjet has a softer edge to the colors. To get a stronger color out of either printer a white decal paper should be used. Clear decal materials allow the background color to come through and give you a faded look. Check out www.DaFont.com for the fonts. Simple designs can be done with most programs. I used Adobe Illustrator to create the ones on the www.NScaleLimited.com pages.
Hey Grey One, What a great idea to get family members involved in the hobby. The prettier of the 2 genders tends to be more artistic and will more than likely come up with some very fine additions to the rolling stock appearace. I've tried to get my Wife and kids involved in the hobby/addiction but they've all got their own thing going on. So, if I want any graffiti on my cars I've got to do it myself. Have I mentioned I'm left handed? 'Nuff said......... Alas, if I want graffiti I have to do it via decals. These are from Blair Line. Brian
Try the .005 Micron Art pens. We model early steamers and so haven't done graffitti, but I wouldn't hesitate to use them for that. Here are photos of a different project I used them on. These are 15mm (roughly TT scale) wargaming figures for a Granadine army. I used the pens to draw the emboidery on the clothing and horse blankets, and to outline the edges of clothing and gear for greater contrast.
Everyone - Thanks for the contributions. Please keep 'em coming including ideas suggestions / methods / sources for decals usage. I once printed on clear labels. In person they looked pretty good but I had to mess with the photos to obscure the obvious. Artic Cat - I'll start a thread on "Getting the Family Involved". Maureen - Ahh, I have quite a few 15mm ancients I've painted in my misspent 20 / 30s and at least a platoon of 1/285th figures that I used 6 colors on. At this point I'm thinking maybe I need to get a bunch of undec 40' boxcars and paint them solid white.
