Tutorial: Tank Weathering Part 2

Final part of this tutorial. I hope it's helped some of you with weathering, sorry it's so long winded but if I'm not clear on something please feel free to drop a comment at the bottom there. 

On with the show! This part will explain how to get the weathering blended nicely into the tank surroundings and briefly cover how I use weathering powders, until you achieve something like this! 

1: Gloss and leaking Oil. I use Vallejo Gloss varnish for this, its exactly the same as Johnsons Klear that unfortunately no longer exists except in boxes under the stairs of professional model painters. 

Once the oil streaks we painted in from part one of this tutorial are dry (shouldnt be more than 30mins -1hour depending on how much oil paint you used.) We start to apply Gloss over the top. Ive added a little black oil paint to the burnt umber to give an engine grease look to it. 

You can see in the picture above that a milky residue is left over, don't worry about this. It soon fades and your left with the result. 

And here is the dry result. Ive not put it everywhere ive put oil paint as that would stop these parts looking so unique. My reasoning is that these sections of the track would be unscrewed to grease the tracks from the inside, thus lots of residue. surrounded by older dryer residue around it. A decent result. 

2: Tracks. This section took a lot of experimentation. So im just going to show you my final result and bullet point the steps I took to get there. 

• Black undercoat.
• Tin-Bitz mixed with gunmetal silver as next layer, total coverage. 
• Wash of nuln oil GW ink. 
• Dry brush of Gunmetal mixed with Doombull Brown. 
• Light smattering of Light Earth weathering powder from Forgeworld mixed with water. 
• HEAVY LAYER OF NULN OIL. 
• Dry brush of 50/50 mix of Gunmetal and Chaos black. 
• Apply Dry Mud weathering powder between track segments. 

and you get this.

I genuinely think you can get the same result by just doing the last 3 steps of this but maybe you wont get the depth of rust and old used tracks as is achieved here. Good luck! And please feel free to get in touch if you have a better guide than this for tracks. 

3: Weathering powders. 

This section is more about how I have come to use these amazing tools than a tutorial. Buy all of Forgeworlds weathering powders immediately. They are beautiful. Dip a frayed brush (to pick up the powder) into the pot and tap your powder onto your pallet, mix with a brush full of water and just paint it on. Once it drys it looks like this. Add more water to dilute once its on the model. The pictures below are before and after I ran a wet toothbrush over it. 

Too heavy. 

Just right!

4: Peeling paint. This bit gets technical but its worth it's weight in gold. Lifted nearly verbatim from Forgeworld masterclass book this gives a beautiful result. 

• Undercoat black.
• A mix of Gunmetal silver and darker silver are painted all over in a patchy way. (See image below.

• Coat in GW purity seal. Leave to dry.
• Coat in shop bought hairspray. Leave to dry.
• Airbrush your chosen colour, I picked a dark yellow. Leave to dry. 
• Dip your brush into water then lightly rub onto surface. BAM! peeling paint. 

Here Ive added in a load of the techniques Ive gone over in the last few sections, lots of forgeworld weathering powder, oil leaking, and gloss varnish to give a wet mud effect. Just went to town on this beast. 

The final touch is running an HB pencil along the raised edges of the metal. This gives the tiny highlight that might have been lost in my excitement over the dozer blades. Who doesn't like massive dozer blades!?

5: Finally a quick run down of  a couple of tools I've used over the last two tutorials. 

Bit of card with a corner cut off to use as a Mask for airbrushing.

Zest-it to use instead of white spirit. It's cheaper, easier to work with and it smells like oranges! I squeezed a little Burnt Umber into the bottle on the left and added a good inch of Zest-it. This is the most perfect brown wash you could ask for. It's what the dutch masters used. 

And the right 3 colours are the only ones used on the tank if you want to replicate my colour scheme. 

They are from Vallejo Model Air range. And work great straight from the bottle into an airbrush or pallet. 

Well I hope this has been helpful! 

Cheers for reading!

Tutorial: Tank Weathering Part 1

Here we are, I have been promising a weathering tutorial for a while now and here it is. There are a couple more stages to go but here are the first steps. I hope this is comprehensive enough for you guys and thank you for all your support during my Armies on Parade board and other endeavors. The techniques outlined here are from chats, Forgeworlds masterclass books, online tutorials, professional painters, my own background as a professional artist and the destruction of many models in my youth.

ENJOY!

1: Gradients to hull. This first step might seem strange and will look odd until we get further along. But the basic idea behind it is to give some interest to flatter surfaces, pointing your gradients in different directions as I have done helps greatly break up the models surfaces that would otherwise seem empty. Maybe giving the impession that  a hull plate has been put on at an angle, or the light has caught a highlight. This has nothing to do with direction of light or OSL (Object Source Lighting) Just a great way to start an otherwise plain tank.

 Just three shades of green were used over a black undercoat. Applied by holding a bit of card to hold in place to mask and liberal use of the airbrush. This effect is possible to get out of a dry brush but its a hassle. I don't see why this effect couldn't be done using the GW airgun.

2: Edge Highlighting. Right this step is a bit of a bugger and again it might seem unnecessary but trust me. it creates a good result. Apply a bit of your chosen colour (the lightest you have painted the gradient with) to your brush and rub it all off on your hand/pallet so you are left with a tiny tiny amount of nearly dry paint still on the brush. Then drag your brush along the corners and edges. This doesn't need to be perfect, you aren't "edge highlighting" power armor and need to blend it or anything. This can be rough. Like the tanks been used and knocked about a bit and the top layer of paint has scraped away. 

This also works to tie the model together. 

3: Sponges. Love them. Learn to use them and use them all the time. If you have bought a model from GW or forgeworld you have sponges laying around. If you wash you have sponges. Sponges cost 50p from most shops. Use sponges...

I use a 50/50 mix of chaos black and doombull brown to make a deep dark rusty black colour to dab my sponge in. Don't press it straight onto the model! Test it on your hand or table or pallet before putting it on the model or you may end up with a massive chunk of black dripping down and ruining all your hard work. Be gentle and learn to love the sponge. 

Less is more when it comes to sponging. Its tempting to go crazy and sponge the crap out of something.  With this tank it had to look battered and well used but not destroyed. So little dabs around the raised areas and between plates, with only a couple of areas receiving larger splotches where perhaps the crew would swing themselves up into the cabin. Think about how this tank would be used. It makes the process bearable haha. and if you dab on silver or gunmetals be very very sparing. This denotes where the paint is all the way down to the bare metal. With these heavy tanks doing that would be hugely difficult. 

4: Drips and leaks. This can be done with GW's Agrax Earthshade at £2.50 for a tiny pot. But for the best results get a tube of burnt umber oil paint for £1.50 and some white spirit for £1 and make yourself a lifetimes supply of perfect wash that GW cant touch for quality or price. 

This bit isnt an art form. Run your wash of choice into the gaps and do a few layers of the wash to build up drips running down. Quick and beautiful result. Dont let people tell you that it doesn't dry because they dont know what they are talking about. A thinned layer like this will dry in about 5mins. Like most inks. Obviously the less you thin the longer it will take to dry. 

You might also notice I've washed the edges with a bit of this wash mix too, again, to unify the painting. Bringing it together and making the tank look like a thing that belongs. 

I hope this has been helpful! And join me next time for part 2. Weathering powders, gloss, chipping and how not to destroy things with weathering powders.

Magic water AoP!

Holy moly! This shit is the bomb diggidy. What are your thoughts on my first attempt at water. 

Oh snap. Armies on parade!

It continues! Board finally got a full on lick of paint and the first member of the Farsight 8 gets his armour shiz done proper yo! Word. 

Also my first outing of the out of this world perfect iwata airbrush. Blimey. That is the shiz. 

Farsight: in and out of suit conversions

I don't like the Farsight model. Same pose as the commander like the 5ton suit can bounce around like a fucking rabbit. It needed to look heavy and bad ass. Sooooo what to do. Tear it apart! The legs into 6bits. Including the kneecap! Which was a pain in the ass. The plasma rifle arm into 3parts. Blah. But I'm happy with how it turned out. 

And finally Farsight outside his suit. 

I love this picture. He looks tired, and old and bad ass. So here is my WIP. It is a very early WIP. 

As you can see I've used parts of the psychic hood from a grey knights terminator and lengthened the legs with a little greenstuff. 

Again using grey knights bitz I've chopped off the back of the dread knight pilot head and sculpted a wizened tau face on the front. 

Quick pin together of the whole model. 

Thanks for reading! And keep checking in as I convert the entire Farsight eight!

Missile broadside dynamic posing!

I have been avoiding making one of these purely because of the pose. It looks like a blocky toy. When it should look like a fancy running bounding ...toy! 

So here is my attempt!

Armies on parade: commander sighted.

Armies on parade: progress

A very quick update with the power of the SLR.

Lets kick things off with an action shot of my Devilfish. Furnished with scout drone poking its head out the top, like the badass sneaky minigun robot death drone that he is. I will be painting my whole army to this standard before taking it further. Oooooh yes. a lot further. This way I can keep the standard consistent throughout the board, and my recipe doesn't need to change. When it comes to phase two of my masterplan you will see changes.

Next is my beat up DeathKorps executioner. poor little bugger, hes had a rough day of it. Obviously heavily beaten down during the first phases of my imaginary war then finished off by the crazy remnants of the blue hippies that are the Tau. You can see the exit holes of the final shots in the bottom right of the track and just below the main turret. Considering wire wool smoke but that might look a little corny and distract from my Tau. Which i might have to do if they dont look good.

As for the rest of the pictures, you have phase one of my hammerhead and my commander.
ENJOY!

Armies on parade: devilfish realism

Right. I have a problem with tau vehicles. So many curvy shapes. Where the hell do you climb up that thing?! Right?!

So. I've stuck a ladder on that bitch! 

With properly spelt instructions too! I got drunk and neurotic ;)

Armies on parade: ariel reinforcement

The sunshark bomber and a devil fish have joined the ranks to fill the gaps in my armies on parade board! Beautiful models. Easy to put together and a pleasure to airbrush. You might notice the drones on the sunshark are dark grey and orange. To make them pop a little and give them a more experimental look. They will have minimal damage so they look freshly installed. And after my tau aircast arrive drone Forgeworld my plan will slowly start to come together! Alsomagnetised  the drones. Don't want them spinning off and embarrassing me.