What technique do you guys use? Pros and Cons? What products do you use?
Each and every one that I can get my paws on!
Pro’s–great-looking models!
Cons–costs money! LOL!
Wow, where to start? A quick search for “weathering techniques” in the forums should provide you exactly with what you’re looking for.
In a nutshell, I prefer acrylic washes and powders, since these are easy to remove if you mess up. You have to seal powders really well, since they tend to flake off and retain very out of scale fingerprints.
Well I try to build as realistically as possible. As such I want my weathering to be real too. After the kit is “Factory Fresh” I leave it out in the sun for months, put little boots on my fingers and walk all over the surfaces, I leave it out in the rain, I shoot at it, I bang it into trees, cars, bricks etc. After a few months I get the desired affect…
Okay, enough with the smart arse. I mainly do aircraft and by no means should my techniques be followed to the letter. Part of the fun of weathering is trying new things and thinking of new ways to achieving the result you want. I suppose the basic starting point is pre shading.
After scrubbing and priming the parts I thin some dark shades (Black, gray, green) and using the finest setting on my airbrush I go around panel lines, edges of flat parts, seats. I use a dark shade of the base coat. After the base coat is put down I revisit the part with increasingly lighter shades to create some contrast. This is especially apparent on wings and the upper surfaces of aircraft where sunlight beats down on them. Seal with the gloss coat of your choice and get ready for a wash. I personally use artist oils and mineral spirits. The default is a black/Umber wash that does a great job of simulating shadows and dirt. I give it an hour or two to dry and then wipe it off.
After the wash is sealed out comes the dry-brushing, pastels, silver pencil, and anything else that comes to mind. On my last kit I played around with grimy fuel tanks since they’re always being handled I tried using salt spread out randomly on the tanks then sprayed a 50/50 mix of Tamiya smoke and thinner, let it dry removed the salt, re-salted and hit it again with a 20/80 umber/thinner mix. I was pretty pleased with the result.
Everyone has their own methods. Frankly there are what seem to be infinite methods out there that all have some very cool results
There’s just too many to list, MB… But in a nutshell, I use washes, drybrushing, & pastels in combinations, the amount of which is dictated by the model…
In general, it’s Washes for depth, drybrushing to accentuate the highpoints… Pastels for subtle effects…
The Pro of pastels is it’s highly controlable for shading and you can wash off mistakes… The Con is that it’s not very durable and easily damaged…
For adding mud, dust, chipping, fading, etc., there’s so many different ways do the same thing you have to decide what it is you want to do…
For instance, one guy uses the hairspray method, another does a salt or sand-chipping technique, and I do rubber cement masking, all three produce similar results…
Then on the next kit, I’ll do something else… It all depends on WHERE the model is being depicted, WHEN it’s being depicted, WHO is using it, and WHAT it’s doing at the time… A Sherman rolling through the Ardennes towards Bastogne in the Winter of '44 is going to look completely different than it did when, say, it rolled off the LST into the Normandy surf and then up onto Utah beach 6 months earlier… Same with a duece & a half that had been in England and only driven back & forth into town, then it got to France and has been running in convoy in the Red Ball Express for six weeks with no maintenence other then the minumum needed to keep it running and now has dents, dings, whatever…
So I really don’t have any ONE thing that I do…
A video I made ages ago about Mud:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pkLgb9ZxpLE&feature=channel_page
Hope it helps!