First oils go onto card and left for an hour or so to soak out the linseed oil. This speeds drying time and increases the coverage.
Stage 1 - Rendering. This is about picking out detail, creating light and shade. It will look a bit stark and exaggerated but this will disappear with later stages. Oils are so easy to work with, you can vary the intensity (translucence) with thinning medium and you can always wipe it and re-do. I apply the oils with fine 000 brushes, one for light, one for dark and use corresponding chisel brushes to blend and disperse.
Before rendering:
After:
Stage 2 - applying operational effects. Nothing magic here, just clues to suggest where and how the vehicle was used. Was it new or well used? Mud and or dust? Wet or dry? Oily, clean? Damaged by vegetation and combat? This is where the vehicle tells its story, whether imaginary or based on solid references. Here, I'm looking at photos of 064 in mid summer 1969, in Phuoc Tuy province, Vietnam. The weather is wet and humid, so lots of mud and dust, coloured by the typical red laterite soils.
Some effects can be done with oils, scratching, chipping, oil and fuel stains, wear. The hairspray technique is great for the latter but since 064 was a new vehicle, I've not used it here.
First some oil-only effects:
The other medium which is great for terrain and weather effects, is pigments. I mix up three small pots from a selection of colours, dark, medium and light. This make life simpler. It also makes it easier to avoid over-doing one colour. The pigments are applied with a small chisel brush and set with a pigment fixer. I drip this on the edges and allow it to disperse by capillary action. It can be left to dry or you can use a hair dryer to speed things up.
- Apply pigment
- Wet with fixer
- Allow to dry
Now comes the last stage, a layer of dust and/or dry mud, without which no AFV seems complete. Come rain or shine, tracked vehicles generate dust, which covers everything, including the crew. Up to now, the weathering may still all seem a bit stark but this final stage will blend everything together and tone it all down. This is a dusting (bad pun) by airbrush of a very light colour. I prefer Tamiya XF57 Buff varnish mixed with XF55 Deck Tan. I thin heavily, use 10psi and keep the airbrush at least 15 cms away. It's very easy to overdo this stage, so it pays to test the mix first, apply small amounts and stand back. It's also important to have good light because the build up of colour is hard to see.
- After dusting
I find doing a small section at a time much more relaxing than going over the whole vehicle with one technique at a time. It's too easy that way to become bored and repetitive, especially so on a one sixth scale model, which is a very large canvas.
