URBAN TEXTURES & BUILDINGS PIGMENTS SET

A quartet of dusts for brick and concrete

The set is aimed at the urban battlefield, that is where plaster, crumbling brick and trodden building slurry meet. The package holds four powder shades: concrete, brick dust, old red brick and the dust of crushed rubble. Together they cover the road from a freshly poured surface to a burned-out wall that has already been standing in a war for several years.

The pigment is a finely ground dry powder with no binder. It is applied dry with a soft brush into corners, joints and transitions, where dirt collects in reality as well, and only then is it fixed. As long as the layer is not fixed it stays velvety and can be wiped off or moved; after a fixer it darkens somewhat more than the modeler expects, and that is why it pays to build the coloring up in thin layers and to keep checking the result in daylight.

Where the four shades meet

On a diorama with a ruin it makes sense to use the whole quartet at once. The light concrete tone belongs on horizontal surfaces and window sills, the brick shades in cracking joints and in places where the plaster has fallen away, and the dirtiest dust on the heaps of rubble at the foot of a wall. The same combination works on the tracks and running gear of vehicles moving among the ruins, because the color of the deposit on a vehicle always corresponds to what the vehicle has been driving over.

The shades are mixable with one another, so a transitional tone can be blended from them to match a particular subject. The powders can also be worked into a thick medium and used as colored grit for weathered fragments of masonry.