[#wstupid]I am doing an A6M5 Zero and I need to make the paint look aged and sort of sun faded. What are some of the ways of doing this?
Thin it with white or yellow…apply lightly over a NMF.
Remember not only did the paint fade but it also thinned and flaked away from the poor quality of the paint and the harsh environment it was subjected to.
Fading and sunbleaching paint… It’s more art than science… The easiest and most forgiving way to do it, ESPECIALLY AT FIRST is to use pastels… Grind up a pile of pastel powder by rubbing the pastel on sandpaper and first doing to a lighter shade of your base-color, if you can’t fing your base, use the closest you can get and add white pastel to it…
Then begin brushing on the powder with a wide, soft brush, (cosmetic brushes are the best) in light amounts, until you achieve the desired effect. It’s easy to over-do, and if you get too heavy-handed, it’ll look like you flew through a flour factory. Also, make sure it’s COMPLETELY free of finger-prints, or it’ll look like it was in an episode of CSI.
However, you may have to go a bit heavier than you think, since when you spray it with a fixative to “set” the pastels, it’ll change the colors and make some of it disappear. But until you get the hang of it, don’t fix it in place… The beauty of pastels is that if you screw it up, you can wash it off and start over. The other way to do it by painting and an airbrush is REQUIRED for it to do it right… You CAN try drybrushing, but I wouldn’t recommend that unless you really know what you’re doing…
At any rate, practice on piece of styrene or an old hulk painted in the colors you’re going to apply the fading on to get the hang of it… Or yeah, don’t use oil pastels either… Use regualr artist’s pastels… They’re softer and easier to apply than regular colored chalk, but not near as permanent as oil pastels… And don’t forget to finish the model in a clear flat. Pastels don’t grab gloss, and you want the finish to have some “tooth” to it to grab the powder…
Let us know how yer doin’ and don’t hesitate to ask for help…
The easiest way is how Gerald wrote, and you can also do successive lighter coats to get your desired results.
This is Model Master II dark Euro green cut w/flat white(two different light filters on pic’s, the darker color is the true color).
Although you alredy have some good suggestions. Way back at the dawn of time “Pactra paints” sold a color called weather, it was a light nuetral tan that came as a wash at full strength. If you misted it on to upper surfaces it did an ok job at bleaching most colors. Of course that was when an airbrush was blowing into a hollow reed filled with paint lol. Now base color spiked with a little yellow & white, (Some pigments oxidize more toward the cool end of the color scale, ie red to mangenta.) is a more sophisticated manner of this technique. Just keep in mind horizontal planes recieve much more radiation than verticals your coating technique should reflect that.