Coloring Laser Cut Shingles

The shingled potion of the roof on shows the results of this method of coloring roof shingles. 

A quick tip that I stole from someone else but works so well it's worth passing along. 

The only thing more tedious than applying roofing shingles to a model has to be coloring those shingles after they're installed. I spent many an hour using a fine tip marker to color each shingle. The results looked fine, but it seemed to take forever. 

Then I ran across a tip in a South River Modelworks kit. SRMW owner Bob VanGelder showed how he colored the shingles quickly, and randomly, before cutting the rows from the sheet. 

The effect was quite effective and the technique reduces the shingle coloring chore to a matter of minutes. 

Here's the starting point, a sheet of plain gray shingles:

Using several shades (I think I used 20%, 30%, 50%, and 70% Warm Gray) of Prismacolor markers simply draw random lines using the markers in line with the shingles. Once the sheet is colored, cut out all the rows, jumble then up on the table and select the rows at random as you apply them to the model. 

It looks that it will never work at this stage - the trick here is to trim all the rows off the sheet and mix them up before applying them.

One caution - unless you're going for a specific effect - like a deliberate decorative pattern on the roof shingles - don't color along the length of the row or you won't get any randomness to the finished roof!