Paint your wagon - Part One

I'll break this into separate parts...

I decided to expand my transfer experiments to dressing up tinplate wagons. 

I have a number of these so after experimenting on some of the better examples, I chose these three that I found in the loft, looking very sorry for themselves, one also missing a coupling.

For information on how to mechanically renovate these, Ron Dodd's Youtube videos explain this far easier than I can and using the same methods I was able to replace the broken coupling and re-use the old brass rivet.

I need background graphics for most of my wagons, so I need a good base to work from. As I didn't take any pictures when I captured the first wagon graphics, I took some while I was capturing another wagon.

I need a reasonable quality wagon to take high-resolution scans. Clearly the three examples above were useless for this, so I removed the body of a reasonable wagon from is chassis and laid it on the flatbed of the scanner.

I've already done the sides (and didn't get pictures) so this is the process I've used to capture the end graphics...

After scanning in high resolution greyscale (600dpi) I have a strong, but dark picture which clearly shows the wear to the back of this wagon - and this was one of the better ones!

No it's time to tweak the image. I don't own Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro, I'm using the Microsoft Office Picture Manager and Windows Paint (which comes with most Windows operating systems)

After tweaking the brightness, contrast and mid-tones using Picture Manager,I now have a full, black & white image to work with, although still scratched and also clearly misaligned when the wagon was made (note the two top panels) 

As this is going to be faded down on the final design, the picture doesn't need to be perfect but the worst of the scratches are painted out by hand, where whole pieces were missing, these were grabbed from other parts of the image and pasted back.

The final result looks like this:

This can now join the graphics I'd previously scanned, ready for further use. 

For these three scrap wagons, I've used a slightly different wagon profile but the process to create the image is the same.

In part two I'll explain how the wagons were designed and the various processes that were involved in bringing them to life.