A quick trial piece was the original intention, something that could be completed over a weekend whilst learning a new technique. The victim was a Model Earth 7/8ths scale water tank kit from their budget range.
Its a one piece moulding that just requires one edge of the chassis cleaning up
I used a Dremel with a burr outside in the garden, removing the bulk of the material in a couple of minutes, then finishing off with sandpaper
The holes for the coupling pins were drilled out on the pillar drill
It was quickly glued together using thick superglue
After about an hour, the whole unit was primed and shot in some rust shades for the tank. The wooden chassis was roughly brush painted with suitable colours.
That got me up to the interesting bit - trying out the hairspray weathering technique. This technique was established by Philip Stutcinskas to fulfil the need of the 1/35 military modelling community who were looking for a way to create scale chips and paint effects on their models. It essentially boils down to painting the colour of your chips on the model, then coating it all in hairspray. Once that has dried, the top coat is sprayed on over the top. A damp brush is then used to agitate the top coat, the water on the brush working through the paint and dissolving the hairspray, thus lifting the paint off. Its like a funky maskol really, where you can control to some extent the amount of paint removed.
You need a low strength hairspray, so I hit up some of Tesco's cheapest and laid down a couple of thin coats, drying with a hairdryer to speed things up.
The top coats were applied, a thin coat of light green, then a grey/green mist down from the top to represent some fading in the sun
After a short period of time to let the paint become dry I started to use a damp brush to try picking the paint off on the corners of the coupling blocks. What I actually got, instead of nice chips was the whole lot coming off in sheets, a bit like peeling PVA off your skin.
Not quite what I had hoped, so I started to try and remove all the green paint with a liberal application of water.
This was partially successful, but I chose to strip the model and start all over again.
After some primer and rust colours this afternoon, I'm back to where I was a couple of weeks ago.
Next job tonight is to paint some wood colours where required, then let it all dry ready for another go tomorrow. The big change will be moving away from Vallejo Air for the top coats to Tamiya. Since the disaster, I have found out that Vallejo Air is an acrylic vinyl, and the chipping technique requires an acrylic lacquer to work best, of which Tamiya is a good example. A test piece showed that I should be able to get the effect I want with the current Vallejo Air rust colours, two thin layers of hairspray and then a couple of thin coats of Tamiya paint.
I hope it all holds out tomorrow, I shall report back either way...
Steve