Make Toy Vehicles Look Old

Do you love the look of Christmas trees on cars (and in 

trucks) like I do? It can be pricey to buy ready made

ones to decorate your home but you can easily paint

 your own and save lots of money. 

I got this idea from Jennifer Rizzo's blog.

Look in the toy section of stores at the cars and trucks.

The miniature ones can start at $1. The bigger the vehicle

the bigger the price. If you want the vehicle to look old,

look beyond the way the car looks in the store. You can

paint the car/truck and completely change the look.

Sorry about the fuzziness of the cars on the back row. My regular camera lens broke and
 I am having to use the "fancy" one that blurs the background....even if I don't want it to. 

The trucks in the above picture were about $6 each.

They are five inches long. They came from WalMart

and Target. I think they all were from a line called

"Just Trucks". No fancy packaging or actions. 

The cars in the photo above are smaller. They are 2.5" to

3" long. They are only about $1 also from WalMart (but 

widely available at other stores too.)

The cars in the above photo are ones that I ordered off ebay.

I wanted some actual older cars/trucks as painting "go bys"

 and to hopefully add some authenticity to the Christmas

 display I was planning. These came out to being about $1 each.

Leanna Maksymuik got her toy cars and trucks at a thrift store.

See how she uses the vehicles to make winter scenes in jars at Poot & Boogie blog.

Here is my new vehicle collection waiting for paint jobs.

Some already have most of their paint on and some are

waiting for their first coat. I just used craft acrylic paints.

If you already like the look of the toy vehicle but want to

add some age quickly, here are some things to do that I 

learned from the actually older cars/trucks from ebay.

1. Get a bottle of medium grey acrylic paint

2. With a small brush dab full-strength grey paint along

the front edge of the hood and along edges of the

vehicle that might get lots of wear normally.

3. Use watered down grey paint to knock the shine

off of chrome and/or plastic parts.

4.Also use watered down grey paint on the tires

and hub caps.

Here are some examples of the quick-y method:

oops! This close-up shows that's a pretty messy paint job on the plastic grill. It will be
 easy  to fix with some water on a paper towel to wipe it off and start over. 

On the front row of the "parking lot" the red truck and the white/red car had the 

If you want to completly change the color of the vehicle

you can use acrylic paint for that too. 

For a complete color change you will probably need to

paint two coats of acrylic paint. 

With a small brush you can dab a rusty/red/brown color

 on places that you think rust would be on an old vehicle.

Have a paper towel ready to dab off paint if you get too

much on the vehicle. If you don't realize the paint covers

 more then you intended until after it dries, 

you can dab the base color back on top of the "rust". 

You can also add some gray with the rust color.

You can decide how rusty/old you want your vehicles to look.

The red pickup only got minimal aging. 

My "splurge" vehicle was one I got on ebay for about $12

(with shipping). The seller was honest about the condition of 

the truck. Even after cleaning up the outside of the Tonka

truck it was pretty gross on the inside.

There was not an opening on the bottom of the truck to be

able to get inside to clean out the algae and mold. I took a

chance and pried the plastic grill off of the rusty metal body.

After the grill came off, the plastic "windows"

came out like an odd-shaped box.

I had not even been able to see that there were seats also.

After cleaning the window box, the seats and the grill 

well, I was able to snap everything back together. Whew!

The only thing I painted on the Tonka truck was the plastic

grill to make it look as old as the rest of the truck.

Here is my "Put A Tree On It" car/truck Christmas vignette

in it's beginning stage. I used rusty or industrial metal objects 

as display stands. The "snow" is made of a layer of sheet or

buffalo snow with plastic snow flakes on top. Cardboard

cut to size holds up the "snow". 

Green bottle brush trees would look good too but all

of my artificial trees have been bleached. 

Here are some of the actually old trucks that came from ebay

in the display. This reminds me of "Ice Road Truckers".

  

There is a mix of old and new vehicles in the tray

 (from WalMart). Some of them were too small to put

 a tree on top. I'm calling this the "parking lot".

Kind of a catch-all for remaining vehicles not on display stands.

The top tier of this stand (from World Market) will never be 

 the same after I left it in the floor and then tripped over it.

I'm ending this post with my secret favorite vehicle in this

too-late-for-2016-Christmas post wishing you a great 2017!

P.S. If you want some "put a tree on it" vehicles for your

2017 Christmas be on the lookout during the year for them.