Painting the interiors.
I made a slightly better effort with the compartment dividers. They are fairly obvious through the windows. For the insides of the sides, if that makes sense, I didn’t need to take quite as much care. A suitable colour will be adequate.
I came across the colour combination as a happy accident, really. You can see
preserved coaches on this web site, and I’ve used this as inspiration and a guide.
Having already painted (and repainted!) the compartments, here is sort of how I went about the basic colours. I used Humbrol acrylics, because I had them to hand and wanted to see how they fared. A rough base coat of 71 Oak was applied. I followed this with 93 Desert Yellow, applied with a ratty nylon brush on the light panels as a grain effect. It barely shows, to be honest. Of course, with care, it would make sense to draw the brush along the real grain pattern directions, but I’m too hasty for that!
No 186 Brown seemed to be a suitable shade for the orangey appearance of the varnished wood. Happily, brushing it on it is translucent on the first coat or two, and let’s the lighter Oak shade show. Painted directly on the grey primer, it much darker and flatter. Having almost exhausted my pot, I switched to 62 Leather, which I ended up using on all the sides where the precise colour was less important.
As you can see, I haven’t been particularly careful with application of the orange coat. I hope it is enough to give an impression of the grain patterns of the veneers used. Once the paint has hardened, I will apply a satin varnish coat. This will have the effect of slightly darkening the paint and hopefully giving an appearance of some depth. We shall see.
Having given the luggage ends a coat of green paint, it was too dull. I’ve rediscovered a brighter green shade in my paint box. I’ll have to go over them again in time.