Somewhat surprisingly, I was in BRM twice this month! After the goods sheds, another project with a bit of vandalism and wreckage. This time; vandalised coaches. The brief was to use some transfers to replicate broken windows on the coaches, then there were some more transfer sheets with bits of graffiti. My brief was to use them, and do some more graffiti too.
Inspiration; this rake of old parcels stock in Hellifield yard. They've been there for as long as I can remember, slowly decaying. Nicely accessible though, as they're unfenced when the cafe car park is open.
The coaches I'd be using for the project- a bit of a mix of eras, potentially a problem. The transfers were designed for Mk.1 coaches, so I needed to use them, but graffiti is a bit of a modern issue. In the end I decided to model a modern-era rolling stock restoration yard, and assume the Mk.1's were upgraded mainline vehicles. Two of them are those magazine partwork coaches that were being sold about 20 years ago.
First tests of the weathering process, using some old toy train/starter wagons to get some practise in.
I wanted to avoid any problems with I.P or copyright, so whilst a bit generic, the graffiti is based off my own artwork and characters. More on this shortly...
For the shoot, to save time I renovated the depot scene from the Burneside-esque tramway project, adding some new buildings from another scrap Hornby Diesel Depot.
Test-fit of the Railtec transfers.
With the dark livery of the coaches, I realised I needed to paint some base layers in white acrylic. Citadel paints as usual.
All looking a bit clean and too bold here, for long-term stored coaches.
They looked rather better with weathering; downward-streaking with cotton buds and kitchen towels, with various washes of watered-down browns, greens, and greys.
Though the transfers weren't designed for the longer windows on the Mk.4 coach, I was able to combine some of them. They ended up a bit creased, but I reckoned I could play that off as a problem with the protective film layer a lot of modern coach windows have.
Oh yes, the artwork. As I said, I wanted to avoid copyright infringement, so used my own artwork. Arf the husky appears in several places (as he has been since about 2002!), the names of the graffiti artists are either nicknames my foster-daughters go by, or in the case of Rhyd a character from another project I've worked on, and Teal was a notorious, if mysterious, graffiti tagger at my first secondary school.
And then there's Hallie.
Robot Girl From The Future! There's a proper explanation of her in the earlier Medical Monday post on the leg break.
Cartoon versions of her, her ever-present (and somewhat long-suffering) teddybear, and her male counterpart, Hal, appear throughout my work planner, and I've started sneaking them into the BRM projects too.
Having incorporated Hallie on the practise diesel shunter, and her and her robot-brother playing teddybear-tug-of-war on one of the tankers, I thought a prominent big piece of one of them on the otherwise rather plain Mk.4 might look good.
In the fictional world of these shoots, Hallie and Hal are pop-culture characters, so the idea is one of the taggers has painted her. The artwork in question, "Caught Ya Napping" is inspired by a famous, early piece of full-height carriage graffiti from the New York El Trains in the 1980's.
And that's that. Something a bit different, and a little darker in tone perhaps than some of the projects I've done lately. A nice change in subject matter to my recent fare though, and rather fun, and an excuse to do something arty.
Aaaaaand in the mag.
