The Warforge Miniature Modelling and Conversion

Experiment: Hairspray Technique, Round 2

Took another crack at the hairspray technique, and had a bit more success this time. I was going to try salt on one half of the torso, but I couldn't find anything with small enough granules to satisfy; maybe some of my ballast/basing sand will work in future, I didn't think of it at the time.

This time, I started with a reddish base color, courtesy of Krylon Rust-colored Primer. I was hoping that the primer would adhere a bit better to the model and resist coming off.

After that dried, I hit it with Testor's Glosscote, a glossy laquer varnish, in the hopes that it'd help keep the orange in place. I let that dry, then applied a coat of hair spray over top, and let that dry too. Then, it was time to break out the airbrush for a white coat of paint overtop. I think this part particularly went better than last time, since I got a much better, more even coverage and it was more opaque.

 

If nothing else, I'm learning to mix/thin paint for the airbrush better.

Then, after letting that dry for about ten minutes (just long enough to clean the airbrush out) I came back and grabbed a soft brush and started attacking the top coat.

Now, obviously the results aren't perfect - I didn't try to 'weather' it in very intelligent areas like around the edges as much as I should have, and I clearly removed sections that were too large. Also, it looks like the softer brush didn't actually remove all of the white, as you can see some of it is still obscuring the rust color underneath. I imagine if I got a stiffer bristled brush I'd be able to make sharper looking chipping effects.

Applying a coat of Testor's Dullcote overtop made the paint fix down a bit better and I imagine you could start applying paint overtop as required.

This is a fair improvement over the last attempt.  Torso's heading back into the pot for another cleaning while I think about these results. I'm contemplating stripping the paint off my Trukk and trying to do this to the whole body of the thing.

UPDATE: One last thing. Before the torso went back into the jar, I figured I'd try out some oil paint weathering. This is done pretty simply by getting a tube of oil paint, applying small dots of the paint around the surface of the model, and then getting a soft brush and some mineral spirits and gently rubbing the dots you've brushed on to thin them and spread them out. This took all of about a minute and a half, and looks beat to hell:

I'm going to practice this a bit more once I get the hairspray method down. I imagine if you use a proper orange oil color, you can get some awesome rust effects going on.