I’m about to begin putting the basecoat down on my Tamiya Panther G. I am also trying to get into weathering more and want to try salt weathering. I am curious, though, as to how long the salt can stay on the model and how many layers of paint you can lay down with the same salt. I thought that if you renew the salt it would look wrong after you remove it.
Also, a few questions on preshading. Can you preshade after priming with primer red? What colour/s are approrpriate for German armour? And where would be the most ideal places to preshade on a Panther?
I would recomend Sand instead of salt. I started out with salt and it did work but if the color was dark or something went bad I keep getting rings and odd things. Then some one on this fourm suggested Sand. I like it better. It will stick with water but I use hairspary then sprinkle the sand on.
But as for your question, I left salt on my for about week or two had no problem on that model. and i have had as many as five coats of paint on the sand. It was a bit harder to get off but nothing major.
Istead of sand/salt, you may want to try the rubber cement masking trick. After I spray the base color and it’s cured, I daub rubber cement on it randomly in a stabbing/stippling motion. When the glue is dry, I paint the top color over it,and when it’s dry, rub the cement off to expose the color underneath… It works really well for vertical surfaces and leading edges of wings…
A couple more questions if I may. How does the paint react when you remove the chipping mask and have you ever had or heard of problems where the layers of paint were too thicK and looked visibly recessed from the last layer of paint?
You can do something similar with commercial masking fluids applied strategically using the point of a sharpened toothpick or dabbed on a wider area using a piece of green scouring pad.
It really depends on how thickly you lay down the paint. If you paint using light coats, you shouldn’t get any “stepping”. It’s always easier to go light and add more paint if required than it is to remove paint after it’s been applied too heavily.
I recently experimented on a combination of the liquid mask Phil_H mentioned and salt. Since the usual airbrushing over a base color wasn’t feasable for me ( like in the FSM article with Slave I ), I wanted to be sure a reverse approach would work using a spray can ( spray-on paint matching the base color over masked panel colors ).
Taking a partially-built Millenium Falcon model someone gave me years ago ( it was in a state beyond my patience to truly salvage ) for the test, I used a brush-on base coat of FS Camo Gray, but wasn’t picky about coverage, then painted random panels with Testors Rust enamel. I covered most of the panels with liquid mask, leaving much of the edges and a few spots in the middle unmasked, and added salt on those open edges after the liquid mask dried. As a last-minute decision to allow comparison I used a salt-only mask on the other side over some panels the previous owner had painted. After all that was done, I sprayed over the experimental areas with Camo Gray matching the brush-on base coat. The results turned out pretty much as I had hoped.
It may seem a bit silly to go through all that trouble for a relatively minor change in technique, but I figured it’s best to be sure before trying it on a “real” project, as well as get first-hand experience on how the materials behave. There’s only so much even the best how-to article can tell you.
