Weathering tanks – Quick and dirty!

As mentioned in an earlier post tanks needs to get some weathering in order to look like they have seen action… I’ll show how I do mud and chipping of paint, quickly and with a nice finish.

The tools needed are:

• A large drybrush, or any brush with stiff brushes for stibbling mud onto tracks and surrounding areas.
• Some foam from a blister for making the chipped paint, tear off a piece, don’t cut it, as you need the rugged edge for application of paint.
• Brown paints for the mud, at least two a dark and a light brown
• Black and metal paints for the chipped paint effects.

Mud:

1. Bring out your drybrush (you could use a stibbling brush, but I prefer a brush with long hair).
2. Dip it in the darkest brown.
3. Wipe some paint off on some paper.
4. Stipple areas around the tracks and the tracks.

Repeat for each time you change to a lighter tone of brown. Stipple less and less for each time to leave the darker brown to show.

Chipped paint:

1. Take the foam and dip the ragged edge in the black paint.
2. Wipe some paint off on some paper (I tend to do that on my wet-palette, as it thins the paint).
3. Press the foam gently against areas where a tank is likely to hit something that will remove paint, or areas where battle damage has occurred.
4. Bring out a small brush.
5. Paint the centre areas of the blacks with metal.

Combining the two I got his result in 20 minutes or so:

/Nicolai aka Atoom