Thanks for all the positive feedback! It was fun to do the artwork for these two, glad you all like them!
For those wondering how this is done from an artwork perspective, here's the gist of it (very simplified). Once we have chosen a prototype photo with weathering we like (usually discovered by Joe, our expert researcher), it is passed on to the art department. We try to analyze and replicate, by hand in Photoshop, step by step, exactly what's going on in the photo.
There are many factors at play. Paint fade, bleedthrough of previous schemes, paint out patches, etc. For example, a really beat up car will often have rust on top of the original paint scheme, receive service and paint out patches and new data, then more years in service and some rust/fade on the patches, road grime/dirt on top of everything, etc. An average weathered car can easily have dozens of separate layers in the artwork, basically built from the bottom up, just as the car would have acquired its weathering in real life. It is quite a process even for moderately weathered cars.
Once the artwork is completed, it all then has to be brought from the digital world to the physical world. Faded paint and color matched plastic parts are matched with the proprietary process of applying the weathering artwork and any pad printing, and all blended and tied together with airbrush weathering.
Brandon
How many extra hours of work is all that compared to a standard as built paint scheme on the same car?
Loving the results, if not the road name selections.
Also glad to see a move away from the spectacular grafitti to more run of the mill rust and grime weathering features. If every car is a grafitti piece of art it's hard to make a believable train from that type of consist. Love that you are finding cars that would be very hard for hand weathering by an average modeler to replicate.
