Wednesday, March 10, 2010

It's a Lot to Weather... (Painters' Help Needed Please!)

Bad puns aside, I've got some new work to show you! (Up until now, the stuff you've seen is quite old).

I haven't picked up a paintbrush for a while, so I've gotten back into it over the last few days. I'll show you some more substantial results later, but for now here's my first foray into weathering.

If you've read the background material for my army here, you'll know that my guardsmen are supposed to be a tough, battle-hardened force. To represent this on my models, I want to have used-looking armour and equipment.

I've gone for the technique of using a sponge to dab on spots of colour to represent the paint chipping off. I need to do it for all my troops so I need a quick but good-looking method.

Firstly, here's what I've done. Note that the rest of the trooper was already painted, I've just tested the method out on this shoulderpad:


To do it, I've done the following:

1. Basecoat with Necron Abyss.
2. Paint a grey stripe of Adeptus Battlegrey.
3. Using a small bit of foam (taken from Citadel movement trays), sponge some Necron Abyss over the grey stripe to make it look as if it has worn through to the layer beneath.
4. Using Calthan Brown, repeat the sponging technique.
5. The sponging technique gives lots of little spots which, in my opinion, make it look too messy. I went back and painted over some of the small spots with Necron Abyss or Adeptus Battlegrey, depending on where they were, to 'repair' these small chips.
6. Using a fine brush and Skull White, underline some of the larger chips.
7. Again with the fine brush but now with Scorched Brown, paint a thin line at the top of the bigger chips. Steps 6 and 7 are meant to give an illusion of depth, but I haven't quite gotten there yet.
8. This time, I went back and painted a 77 symbol but purposely doing it broken so it looked chipped, but in future this would be done after step 2. Note that I'm not sure this symbol will be a 77, but I wanted something to go there on the test model and I haven't yet come up with a symbol that I can freehand consistently.

So please let me know what you think!

From any readers who have used this method before, I'd love some hints and tips to improve my work. Please leave any and all advice in the comments!

As always, thanks for reading and stay tuned!

3 comments:

Col. Corbane said...

I think it's worked really well mate, can't wait to see a squad all weathered up.

Craig said...

this is a technique i learnt from the painting corps and i found it worked really well on large panels of armour like a sm wolf lord i did, but uv but it to great use here. i think it looks brill and you should go ahead with the rest of them!

Frag_Dad said...

Thanks for the comments guys - the general consensus seems to be that people like it, so I think I'll go ahead and paint up some guys completely.

Hopefully I can get some pics up soon!

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