Weathering Practice

A friend of mine generously donated the use of one of his Rhino's so I could practice a few weathering techniques.  The vehicles used by his 13th company space wolves have seen a lot of abuse of the last 10,000 year,s so I got to go a bit crazy with the rust effects.

My initial plan was to experiment with some salt and hairspray techniques I'd found.  This turned out to be much less successful than I would have liked.  I'm not entirely sure what went wrong.  The salt proved to be extremely difficult to remove and left much smaller patches of rust than I had anticipated.  In some places the process of removing the salt also removed the layer of rust I'd painting under the base color.  I ended up needing to remove some of the salt with fine grit sandpaper.  The only place I was happy with the technique was the yellow trim, where the effect is quite striking.  Most of the rust you see was added afterward using a sponge.  I think I'd like to try to hairspray technique again eventually with some larger grained salt and cheaper hairspray.  Hopefully that would solve some of the problems.  I may also coat my rust layer with some gloss varnish to keep from rubbing it off as I remove the salt.  The colors used for the rust are listed after the pictures.

I started by sponging on a heavy coat of Scorched Brown in the areas I wanted rusty, concentrating on the places that would get the most abuse.  Some addition spots were added using an old beat up brush since the sponge was unable to reach into some of the crevices where I needed rust.  Next was a lighter coat of Vermin Fur sponged on over the brown.  I found it looks better if the Vermin Fur overlaps and extends past the edges of the Scorched Brown in some places, rather than staying entirely inside the darker color.  Fiery Orange was then added sparingly to a few spots.  The streaks coming down from the rivets on the sides were done with Gryphonne Sepia.