"Weathering atmospheric grime/film on Primaris armor" Topic

I made a conscious decision to not only do my Primaris in a dusty, more muted color scheme over the top of the Macragge Blue but also to do some actual classic weathering grime/film/dust buildup on the army.

The way the GW studio paints their Primaris is just way too clean for my tests. The paint jobs are amazing, but I wanted my Primaris to look like they've been out in the elements on campaign on a planet where their vehicles and dreadnoughts have accumulated a good amount of atmospheric weathering.

This is one my first major attempts at weathering a military-type vehicle in quite a long time, in fact years. I considered it to be sort of practice for when I build my Tiger Tank diorama later on. I'm also going to be building a Bandai X-Wing model that I want to do similar weathering on.

I was also determined to do a realistic-looking military vehicle without using an airbrush, relying only on a spray can base coat and applying a wash by hand.

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My camera makes some of the weathering look more brown and extreme than it actually looks on the model in person. In person a lot more of the blue actually shows through. But the lighting in the room kind of messes with it visually a bit. I made sure that there was enough of the Macragge Blue still showing that you understood what the original color of the tank is. I also tried to use some logic on some areas, such as the side hatches having grime on the bottom half but cleaner on the upper half because of the hatch being partially shielded by the frame surrounding the hatch. I also went for a look where I had weathering kind of "catching" in the crevices between the lines of armor plating on the front, with the upper parts of the armor plating slightly cleaner.

The weapons are going to be painted over in black and silver colors so I just did a more general wash over those without worrying about it too much.

I'm going to so a more subtle weathering on the dreadnoughts, but the Repuslor was really good practice for just diving in and trying out my hand at weathering.

The wash I used was Citadel's Agrax Earthshade. I selectively tried different strengths of it and used a stippling kind of motion with the paint brush to achieve the gradients of going from dirty to cleaner.

You can also see the contrast of the vehicle with the cleanness of the Primaris tank gunner on the turret. I will be weathering the actual Primaris' armor as well but to a much less degree so that there's some contrast between the actual troopers and the vehicles.

Here's a good example of weathered armor:

A good first attempt. I don't use airbrush either one trick I have found is the use of weathering powders mine are Tamyia but there are others out there.

The powders come in lots of shades to represent rust, mud, snow etc. They can be dry brushed on or mixed with water and put on like a wash or as a paste. However they dry very differently to washes and give a much better final look than ink washes for weathering vehicles.

You can do amazing things with GW figures once you have mastered current modelling techniques.

Things like leaking oil, accumulated mud, scratching of surfaces, rain streaks, alien goop …

Another trick I learned from the super realistic school of Mecha painting is that using a gloss surface is a boon to add even more texture to a model. It gives the figures a high-tech look while giving a greater contrast for the weathering.

Nice work.