I’ll be honest and say i’m intimidated by weathering fearing I’m going to ruin a perfectly good paint job but weathering adds so much to a model that I want to learn how to do it properly. I’ve painted this Fat Man atomic bomb in vallejo acrylic yellow and black and coated it in matt varnishand want to give it a weathered look. I’ve read, and watched, so much on the subject that i’m in a state of ‘analysis paralysis’. Can anyone lay out the steps that i could do to give the model a weathered look?
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Maybe a light wash with a dust or dirt color. Good luck!
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It does look a little dirty in original photos although what I’ve been able to find are B&W. It looks like it’s been handled a lot by dirty hands, so not scratched up or damaged in any way just a bit grimy. At least one of the flat fins on the tail end have names or other text scrawled on it in the photos I’ve seen, probably some of the typical “Dear Tojo have one on me” type of wisecracks that obviously were never going to be seen. Something like this didn’t have much chance to get all that weathered or banged up - it was assembled and crammed into Bock’s Car and off it went.
I know virtually nothing about weathering an atomic bomb, and honestly, I’m not sure they were ever really out in the “weather” in the first place. So my instinct would be to keep the weathering pretty light rather than trying to make it look heavily worn.
If you want to experiment without risking the paint job, I’ve been having really good luck lately with the AMMO MIG Missing Link watercolor pens. They’re completely water-soluble, so if you don’t like what you’ve done, you can remove it with a damp brush or Q-tip and basically start over.
That’s one of the things I like most about them. You can gradually add a little grime, streaking or color variation without worrying that one wrong move is going to damage all the work underneath.
For something like this, where I wasn’t sure how much weathering was appropriate, that’s probably the direction I’d go.
Wow, that colorized version really tells the story.
Seeing all those signatures on it is kind of eerie. If I were building this, I’d be very tempted to try to reproduce them somehow.
I did a little digging, and there are actually some very high-resolution period photos of the signatures close up, including one from the National Archives. With a good scan and a little image work, I think you could probably turn the signature field into a clear decal.
At this scale they wouldn’t all need to be individually readable — just reproducing the overall pattern of handwriting would add a tremendous amount of historical context to the model.
