Color for Manhole Covers

Black is the obvious choice, but there is lots of room for creativity. Some manholes fade to a light gray. Others get a "dirty" black, as strange as that sounds. This winter lots of manholes have acquired "salt" gray or streaks of anti-ice spray. Now and then a manhole near the middle of the road is painted with one or two ribbons of yellow. Few are centered. A neat detail is a manhole with smudgy yellow stripe(s) [or remnants] that has turned a bit, placing the stripe(s) at an angle to the stripes on the street.

Rozy,

There you go. Hope this helps. 

Use old weathered pennies.  Then tell people you model the American Dream, where the streets are paved with gold...

Well that sure takes all the fun out of it for us!  Don't you know you're not allowed to solve your own problems?

Black and Rust

I often see questions like this. It's not that you can't get a good response here but why not just go out and look at a manhole cover, railroad track, sidewalk, street or whatever object you're seeking info about? If it's available, there's no better source than the real thing. Take a notebook, a tape measure and a camera. First hand knowledge may reveal many things that you might not not have considered.

here is my one as experiment.

using a vectorcut manhole and applying a layer of graphite using a 4B pencil make the surface look shine like a raw steel.

Andre.