What a piece of junk!

Tonight I step away from the Ramos crew for a moment to show progress on another project. As I mentioned in an earlier post, I threw my hat into the ring for Wyrd Minature's "Iron Painter" online painting competition. I've always admired this event as a spectator, as many of the entries are rather good, so decided that I would capitalize on my new found painting momentum and see how many rounds I can make it through. Because of the huge number of entrants, the first elimination round sees the contestants placed in three-way competitions, rather than just one-on-one, raising the challenge even more.

The theme for this first round is "Start Your Engines." While wanting to net some theme points, yet not wanting to interpret the theme too literally, I opted to put together a vignette with a severely rusted out piece of machinery as the focus. With a pile of old Mongoose Games' M9 Chickenhawk Marauders suits for the now defunct Starship Troopers miniatures game that I picked up for $2 a piece at GenCon a few years ago, I decided that one of these walkers would be the perfect centerpiece. The casts for these models were a bit rough with some awfully shallow detail in places and the weaponry and equipment pieces were rather toy-like. So raiding my bits boxes I managed to find enough "gribblies" to fill the blank spots and holes where I left off pieces of the original kit.

With the decision made to attempt to create a rusted out derelict of a machine, I opted to try out a technique for creating a convincing weathered effect that I'd read a fair bit about on a number of blogs - salt weathering. For those unfamiliar with this technique, it involves putting down a base color that you want to show through (rust in my case), adhering salt crystals to the base coat with either water or hairspray, spraying on the top coat that is to appear weathered, and then brushing off the salt and thereby pulling away the top coat. So, for stage one, I've laid down a solid rust brown coat using a Tamiya spray can.

Wanting to add some variety to the appearance of my rust, as metal never rusts uniformly in reality, I next stippled on a orangey-brown over most of the piece. Ultimately this proved not to be enough of a contrast, instead just blending in with the brown, and it was effectively unnoticeable in the later stages.

Next I gave the piece a healthy dose of hairspray (an unscented, cheap brand) and sprinkled the salt on top of it, before hitting it with a coat of gloss yellow. It is this stage that I'm going to have to experiment with in the future as it's the key to getting the best results for this technique. If your hairspray isn't tacky enough, the salt crystals will just fall off. If the salt crystals are too large, they'll just fall off. However, if the hairspray is applied too heavily, and your salt crystals are too fine, they'll form a nearly impenetrable crust that you can't brush off later without taking the model all the way to the bare plastic.

Finally I take the model under a drizzle of cool water and attack it with a tooth brush, scrubbing hard enough to pull up the stubbornly stuck crystals, yet light enough to hopefully not pull all of the paint off. It's hard to see here, but I did just that in a few places, bringing the model all the way down to it's bare grey plastic.




After doing the above steps on both legs and the hull of the walker, I assembled the pieces, resulting in the product you see at the top of the post as well as below, from another angle.  The next stages will be to pick out some of the lights in a gem effect as well as add some shading to distinguish the panel lines and various gribblies.  To make this model even more of a learning experience, I'll also be trying out weathering powders in various rust, dirt, and iron hues to really take this guy downhill.  Of course I've still got the base and the other figures that will form the vignette to get done, and all by Sunday.  Let's hope I still paint my best when under pressure!