Goblin Halloween Diorama- Part 16

Painted to show peeling paint.

I painted the house of the diorama this week.  It took four coats of paint (not including the 1:12 dilution of black paint painted onto the individual clapboards) to make it look like this.  The reason for the multiple colors is that I'm trying to make the house look old and run down.  A house this old would have been painted a number of times, and they might not always have been the same color.  For this diorama, I want it to look like that spooky house everyone says is haunted.   The first photo shows the house as it stands with the completed paint job.  The second photo shows the house about half-way through the process.

Painted with blue and yellow coats.

 In order to paint a house to look like an old house, you have to think about what happens to an old house.  Paint does not fall off a house evenly.  Some places get more sun and the heat blisters the paint.  There will be damage and rot from water run off.  Mold and mildew will grow on the clapboards causing discoloration.  Boards crack and warp.  Water and mud splash along the base.  I was trying to replicate this on my old house, but it is not meant to be photo real. 

Before the paint.

It was hard to get up the nerve to start putting paint on the house.  Without any paint on it, it looked like an old house that had been abandoned for a very long time.  I did not want the house to look that old because it did not necessarily fit the story line for the diorama.  Anyway, once I got started on the painting it turned out to be a lot of fun.  The technique I used for painting was a dry brush technique.  Dip the brush in paint and then wipe it off on a paper towel until much of the paint is removed.  I used an old sable brush.

For the first coat, I mixed a light gray craft paint with a light tint of blue.  Then I started painting blobs of paint all over the house. I dabbed paint all over covering about a forth of each clapboard.  The main thing is that you want the blobs of paint to be random.  You do not want to have every blob spaced an equal distance apart.

The second coat of paint was the same light gray paint with a couple of drops of straw colored paint to tint it slightly yellow.  More blobs of paint went all over the house, sometime overlapping the previous blobs that were a slightly blue tint.  Each set of blobs covered about one quarter of the surface.  Sometimes they were dots, sometimes I used my finger to smear a blob out.  Or, even use a paper towel to lift some off if I thought there was too much paint on a section.

The third coat of paint was a plain light gray.  On this coat instead of a general blob, I mashed the brush straight down in order to splay the bristles out in all directions.  Once almost all of the paint was out of the brush, I swiped the brush along the length of the clapboard so that there was the barest touch of gray along the length of the board.  I did not worry if some of it did not receive any paint from this brushing.

The final coat was straight white craft paint.  Once again I pounced straight up and down with the brush while I was making the blobs and brushed horizontally across the clapboard afterwards.  That was the end of the painting.  I may go through and give a light sanding on a spot here and there, but not a whole lot of that.

Now that the painting is finished, I will be working on the "field stone foundation of the house.  After the field stone foundation is added I will begin working on the tin roof.  More about that in the next post.