Advice on painting and weathering extremely small ships/armor?

Tools, Techniques, and Reference Materials Techniques
1

Hello FineScale Forumers,

My local circle of gaming and modelling enthusiasts is diving into a game called Dystopian Wars which involves tons of very small scale fanciful armor, air ships, and naval vessels. Since painting and detailing armor is new to most of my friend, I have been loaning out my copies of FSM magazine.

One challenge that we are facing is the exceedingly small scale of these models. A cruiser or escort may only be 30-35mm long, and the largest capital ships are only 100-120mm, and the overall scale of the game is something like 1:1200.

So in this size and at this scale, are there any recommendations for achieving realistic weathering or damage effects? General tips on working at such a fine scale? It does help that some things like rivets and planking are not exactly to scale, but more representational.

Here is a link to a gallery of the models:

http://www.spartangames.co.uk/galleries/dystopian-wars-gallery

Thanks for any advice,

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From what I can see, the ships are airbrushed mostly with lights/minute detail being hand painted. For something this small, good masking (blue tack or poster putty) is the key. For the hand-painting route, you need good paints the level out well (games workshop or vallejo).

Weathering for small stuff isn’t all that different from larger vehicles. A nice dark wash is a good start, then you can follow that up with any “isolated” weathering you want.

On the big striped ship, I can see where they airbrushed the torpedo? tubes in the front with a dark brown/smoke color, and their is evident overspray. For something this small, you need either a really good airbrush (with a really small tip) or you need to use pigments or weathering compounds. I use the Tamiya weathering sets for streaks and smoke. They also work well for creating a dry-brushing effect. The raised detail/rivets are also dry-brushed. Other details look painted on.

For battle-damage, you can use a razor blade to gouge out bits of plastic, then weather that. You can also use the same “chipping” techniques used on armor models. At this scale, using the sponge technique for chipping would work find. Just tear off a bit of sponge, dip the edge in paint, blot off the excess and then dab it around hatches, etc.

Finish with pigments. You can use them for rust, stains, streaks, fading, mud, etc. There are tons of articles on pigment use you can check out.

Looking at the water some more, I think they airbrushed various blue tones, then they dry-brushed light grey or white over the crests. Again, at this scale, dry-brushing will help tremendously.

Also, I may not build stuff quite that small, but my Star Wars model page illustrates several of those techniques better than I can explain them. Hopefully all of this gives you a good place to start.

Cheers

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Meant to add that depending on the plastic color, you could use light sanding pads on the rivets. If the paint job is a dark color and the plastic below is say light gray, then the sanding pads could remove the paint leaving lighter colored rivets. You could even use your knife or whatever to create scratches that way. Again, at that scale, it won’t be very noticeable.

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Thank you, this is very helpful and I have passed it along. Nice work on those Star Fighters - that TIE facility is awesome beyond measure!

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One other thing you need to pay attention to.That is the size.The smaller the unit is the lighter touch you need with the weathering .As a matter of fact if you try to weather as you would 1/200 or 1/350 you will be to dark overall .The smaller the scale the lighter the colors and weathering needs to be tankerbuilder