Southest Asian Temple, Part 6 - Coloring the Stone

    One of the temples with the first layers of dry brushing done

As mentioned in the last post, once the sand texture had been added to the stupa and parts of the temples, I did one final spray coat of flat black. This was to seal it in, so that when I went to paint the surface, the brush didn't scrape the sand off. After the spray dried overnight, I sat down to what I thought would be the most tedious and time consuming part. I always like to coat my temples entirely in black acrylic paint. This allows the dry brushing to show more depth and fills in those nooks and crannies spray cans miss. I diluted the black paint down to about 50/50 with water, and was actually surprised how easily it went on. I was expecting this to be a laborious process, but it went by fairly quickly.

    The stupa with its black base coat, dark gray and medium gray dry brushing. Note you can barely see some of the embossed surface design which was mostly covered up by the sand.

I let the black paint dry overnight to "shrink wrap" onto the models. Then I grabbed my darkest gray paint, a cheap craft paint by Ceramcoat, and used a "web brush" technique to cover most of the surface. I left little crevices and joins black, but the gray is so dark it is really hard to see the difference. Once again, I let it dry overnight. Then I grabbed Ceramcoat "Hippo Gray" -- a medium gray tone -- and did a thick dry brushing over the surface. However, I left some of the less raised areas the dark gray to give it some depth. For example, I made sure each level on the roofs of the temples is visible, and left parts where the sunlight would be blocked in the darker gray. Still, I was painting more than 50% of the surface, though. This is the stage at which these photos were taken.

The second temple - note I did not put the sand on the lower portion of the temple in the hopes the embossed design on the cardboard box would look nice.

You may notice I have left the lower part of the corner columns of the temples black, so far. I intend on trying to print out an image of a carved surface and apply it to them. Hopefully, it works out! Next up, though, I will do a light gray -- Howard Hues Rebel Gray -- on a smaller portion of the models. I plan on doing a final white dry brush on the highest portions. I am trying to reproduce the effects of sunlight on the surface, of course.