Heljan western - taking a deep breath!

Sometime ago I put up a post of a second Heljan Western I purchased on ebay.   This model recently came out of the box.  As work was progressing well on painting the parcels wagons and the sturgeon wagon is complete save for the handrails, I though I needed a new challenge.

As the model is secondhand I am just having a go trying out some techniques for weathering/painting on it.  If it all goes wrong, I can just strip it down and repaint it.  So I un-clipped the body.  The detailing on the chassis has yet to be undertaken, and I put this to one side.

With the body un-clipped I splatted some white paint all over the paint job with a brush and then tried to take some of it back off with a cotton wool bud.  Once reasonably happy with this, I sprayed some faded blue in stripes over this.

Lastly, I made a mix of weathered black and frame dirt and applied this over the body, before wiping most of it away with cotton wool buds.  This is the first of several paint layers which will attempt to make a suitably distressed western down in Devon in the mid/late 1970s.  It did take a bit of deep breath to start this one - but now it is started I am keen just to try whatever I fancy.  Hopefully more progress on this one soon.....