Building an 'Improved' Wallace RC 1/16 scale KAIRYU Suicide Submarine Kit, Part-18

A Report to the Cabal:

Time came to complete the 'weathering' task, shoot a well flattened clear coat, and move onto a 1/72 ALFA turnkey job.

A verity of tools and consumables were employed on the KAIRYU. I think you'll find the discussion interesting.

Just some of the background information I gathered. The Ballantine photo was most instructive as to form and degree of weathering but offered no color information -- that dope I cobbled together from color copies of rusted structures and machinery. What you see here is a fraction of the documentation I gathered on the KAIRYU and weathering characteristics in general. I recommend that you start and maintain a file containing pictures of weathered structures and machinery.

The majority of the rust and streaking was done with water-soluble acrylic paints. Some straight from the bottle, some mixed to colors suggested by the documentation. Though these paints cannot be 'blended' together on the work, if care is taken and your technique has matured enough you can push the well thinned paint around with brush and other tools till it transitions from wet to hard film -- that magic moment when the paint can be pulled and pushed into steaks of descending density. Practice, practice, practice!

Just some of the tools used to apply and texture paint. The sponge rollers are fine for large models, but have little utility for subjects smaller than 1/72 scale. Stipple, fan, wedge, pointed and broad house brushes are my favorites. The stiff toothbrush is a good way to fling specs of paint onto a model (good for simulating small scale barnacles, and spot rusting on larger scale subjects). Sponge brushes and house brushes are suitable for radial streaking on round hulls. The fan brush is ideal for dry-brushing bright edges. And the stipple brush is good for dense rust effects.

You want to become proficient at weathering? Then get out into the real world and study painted machinery and vehicles that have sat in the great outdoors for any length of time. A trip to the local junk yard with camera and note pad would be an afternoon well spent.

Almost all of my oil paint work is done with a stiff pointed brush and a fan brush. That's it. The oils are slow drying, and can be blended into one another, and they can be pulled along the work to transition smoothly from solid opaque to invisibility. The most often used weathering colors are black, white, burnt sienna, some red, and yellow. Shades are mixed as required from these. Note that I'm using a nonabsorbent piece of heavy paper to serve as a mixing palate.

The gross rust goes down with the aid of a very stiff stippling brush using acrylic paints. Here I'm blasting away around the flood/drain holes at the bottom of the hull. Note how the hull weathering has brought the radial and longitudinal raised weld lines to life.

Sometimes you'll desire to make the radial streaking on the hull a bit more pronounced, this can be done by scrubbing the hull, radially with a small wad of '00' steel wool.

If it becomes necessary to mute the radial streaking, then you simply blast the model with some well thinned black paint as the spray-brush is moved in a radial fashion over the work.

At the seams of access panels and on the weld lines I'll use a post-it-note as a low tack mask to control where I apply oil paint. The oil is pulled, away from the mask to represent vertical streaking.

As oil paint will remain 'wet' for several days you have plenty of time to blend and pull the paint with tools other than the brush used to apply it. Such as this piece of wadded up paper towel.

Note how the oil paint has been driven into the engraved lines and holes of the access panels, highlighting them to good effect.

Use of the fan brush to accentuate edges. Use a 'bright' color for this job: white is typical, but I've seen silver used effectively as well. This is a technique that required the minimal amount of paint within the bristles of the tool -- the objective is to minimize the paints vehicle and thinner, to put down raw pigment onto the work. Highlighting like this, called 'dry brushing,' does so much to breath life into the presentation. I underexposed this shot so you can make out the sharp bright contrast of the bright hatch well upper edge, just highlighted by the fan brush. Light, quick, multiple strokes of the brush is how you do this task.

Damn! Not bad, if I say so myself!

You should weather the model not to hide errors, but to enhance details that otherwise would be lost to the viewer.

Note how the process has brought the access panels and penetrations to life. The 'paint chipping' effect on the flag is another visual cue that tells the viewer that this is a vehicle that has seen hard times and deferred maintenance.

Though not used on this project, I wanted to share with you some other weathering mediums: Chalks and oil based crayons. Chalk, though looking good when laid down often disappears when the clear protective coat is applied to the model. The artist crayons are soft, like lipstick, and smear and blend into one another well -- an excellent material for the multi colored waterlines seen on ships that operate in temperate waters.