Experimenting with coloring stripwood

I don't use stripwood a lot, but when I do I generally don't want it to look like brand new wood. I have used India ink and alcohol solutions to weather wood but they still keeps the wood looking fresh (meaning, yellow) with hazy gray streaks or parts. I don't find that convincing. It might be realistic occasionally but it isn't what I picture in my mind. Below is an picture of three concentrations of ink/alcohol satin. In the lightest, it still looks like dirty, raw wood underneath. 

For my Coal Trestle, I used a highly-saturated ink/alcohol wash applied multiple times until it turned the wood dark gray/black. The ink pigment even left residue on the wood which looked a lot like coal dust, an effect I replicated all over the trestle. But I don't always want that either. I love using Minwax "Jacobean" stain to color wood as it looks just like fresh creosote, but that isn't always the right effect for every application either. I am currently working on something that will need a weathered black color and a weathered gray color, so I started practicing. By the end of the day my desk looked like a mad scientist's workshop with paints, stains, and ink supplies all over the place.

There are some excellent online articles (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3) by Mike Chambers that walk you through how to use paints and inks to color wood, and how to layer the effects. It even has helpful recipes. So I combined various colors of acrylic paint (two shades of brown, two of gray, plus black) in a container with water and let scrap stripwood sit in it overnight. And the results were underwhelming. It did look more brown than yellow, but since neither matched the two colors I was shooting for I decided to take another crack at it.

Then I started dipping them into my saturated alcohol/ink solution. After two dunks they were acceptable. However, the wood was soaking wet, and I was impatient. So, I turned to my own in-house kiln (disguised as a kitchen oven) and that quickly "seasoned" the wood.

The result was much better. It still isn't as dark as I would like, but if they appear too faded it will be a lot more realistic than if they are too black. Plus, I need several other colors of wood for other parts of the project and this will be a nice contrast to them. Clearly, there is more here than I originally thought and I will need to continue my experiments.