Hi guys

I am on a roll with requests here, I am now after techniques for weathering figures, how do you guys do it, for instance

A) how do you make colours looked washed out?
B) how do you make uniforms look dusty or just plain dirty.


Looking forward to the replies

Robin

Hey Robin!

Great to see you getting more active again!

As for the faded out look, it depends on the color, but what I usually would try is to find a complementary shade to the color that you are painting and fade the color out.


Tan seams to work pretty good for greens, flesh or gray for black and so on.

The weathering can be done with pastells, they are easy to use, and if you make a mistake they are very easy to correct, just brush it off. You can also just paint it on with different colors.

I too have taken to using flesh colors for fading. Val Sunnyskin tone works really well on reds, backs...

For weathering, on the Black Prince that in my workbench, I used various acrylics, ochre, umber and choc brown. First, I wet the area to be weathered with a bit of water. Really just made the area damp. Then, with the muddy slurry of various combos of the brown and ochre acrylics, I gently tapped in some of the slurry to the previously dampened area. I found this a bit easier to control.

Keith

Hallo Robin,

For fading i use skin tone or a light grey with the color.
For weathering i use MIG pigments. It is better than pastel chalk's. It is a pure pigment and can be got on several colors of dust, earth and rust.

Greetings

Marc

Hi Robin,

A) The washed-out and worn areas of the fabric should be lightened with the appropriate colour of the base fabric: cotton, off-white or white; linen, dirty buff, greenish or brownish beige; wool... well a wool colour! I think one of the best looks to aim for myself is to have a gradual fade from top to bottom of the garment, as though the dye is washing down into the lower areas - you see this in the lower legs of jeans sometimes for example, but this is hard to balance with the normal shading so it's not always possible to do well. As you can also see from jeans, fading occurs fastest in areas of wear so imagine where these will be and lighten accordingly.

B) I like to apply dust and dirt over a fully-painted clean paintjob instead of laying these in at the basecoat stage and then highlighting and shading accordingly. With dust I really feel this looks better most of the time, for dirt I think it's easier to get a consistent finish doing it at the end.

I usually paint my weathering effects on with a very gradual buildup of acrylics but I've used pastel dust too sometimes and the results can be very realistic; they're particularly good at simulating dust I think. It's self-explanatory how to apply pastel dust dry but if I'm using them wet I mix up the dust to a slurry (with water usually, but white spirit/turps works even better) and then paint them on. When it's dry you can blow or gently brush off the excess and if you work the surface with a stiff brush you can rub it into the paint for a most realistic result; this is great for ground-in filth on cuffs or elbows. One of the other great things about using pastels is if you're unhappy with how it's looking you can often wash it all off and start again from scratch.

Einion

Robin,
For the natural dyes, say pre-1700 or so, I'll toss this out for fading. For the blues, (woad or indigo) use a pair of worn blue jeans for ideas. Madder (red) fades into a brownish color over time and a good many of the yellows go to a beige, buff, or yellowish version of the other two. I've literally watched a nice shade of yellow go to a light beige in a bit under two weeks in our desert sun. Pretty much, yellows fade first, blues fade last, and reds fall in-between.

Gary

This is nothing to do with weathering, but with Gary's signature line. I feel very much like an insect now...

Andy

Aahh, I can see you're not done with that grasshopper bidness yet! :lol:



Q.

Well, at that time I didn't think I was at risk as paintbrush material.

Today at work I:
taught
learned
counselled
cajoled
thwarted
created
destroyed
procrastinated

Clearly there's more to be done...

Andy

PS another thread hijacked for silliness...

I just read a post over at Tricks and Tips on Missing links (hey if they post 'em I'll steal them). Dude reckons he put an acrylic painted tank in water for 24 hours to loosen some decals and that this caused the acrylics to fade as if the tank had been in the sun a while (maybe he had...well he is an armour modeller). Anyway maybe this would work on uniforms for those of us who don't go for the pristine parade ground look. Now where's my filtered spring water from the Andes......

I like it! Why not use that as your signature?

Gary

Hey, I did some more stuff after I came home too!

folded laundry, fed the dog...

...as did I. Fed the kids and dog,tidied up the lawn, retired to my modelling area where I proceeded to a) put a paint mark that would'nt come off onto my latest project, b) painted over some superglue that hadn't completey dried and c) glued my tweezers to the work bench. I then went back to feeding the kids some more, more work on the lawn ..........