Tutorial - Weathering a wall by using Hairspray

posted by roman, jarhead, kong

Okiledokely...

after the jungle is a bit upset at the moment, like all apes are screaming and rumbling through the jungle i have time to bring this planned tutorial up today for calming my brain.

Mati won't arrive tonight from Berlin because of his flight had been canceld due the weather. No problem for the jungle to bring mati safe to Bavaria, at least i do hope say. Everyone now has to press his left thumb til he arrived, ok? Please. If that won't work he really has some hell of a distance in front of him to walk. My thoughts are with you out there, where ever you may be... try to bring your booty up in the air with all means necessary, my cowboy!!


Weathering a wall by using hairspray?

First when it comes to weathering i want to link this article here. Ok, now as everyone should be ready for another round of "Switching the brain off and let the muse dance - base-building-session"...

This time i have used carbage, yeah. As i did prepare the bucket for the latest tutorial i had one piece remaining, The one i did cut out. Nothin on my mind i found myself in need to paint up some genestealers of Space Hulk. I did so. Five, done fast, i guess as fast as i do know now that i won't put them up to ebay, haha.

One other was planned for something else. I liked the idea of this "ground-breaking" Alien - i hope you know which model i mean from the box, the one crushing out of the floor - yeah... lost my point... ...       ..  .

Ok, here we go. I hold him in my hands and thought why this never had been used to break out of a wall. So i switched my brain offline and build a base from parts explained above and also some remainings from my electronic box. The finish result looks like this:

For the wall i wanted to have dirty, gritty old look wiht chipped colour which shows rusty areas. For this task i took a bigger brush to bring a mix of Scorched Brown / Vermin Brown / sometimes a tip of Chaos black at it. Basecoating before has been with complete white primer. No idea why, guess i didn't find my can of black.

Sorry only got this bad photo of this step:

Next step is using the hairspray. Normally, if you only got a wall without a miniature on it i would do this in only using the hair spray can. I don't want my already glued alien full wiht hairspray so put a bit of liquid hairspray in the airbrush (make sure to clean it aferwards with a lot of care, i did use Revell Airbrush Cleaner and patience) to have a better control on the areas i am smashing full with hair spray.

Getting some liquid spray i used a little plastic can to spray in. Done this until i got some liquid hair spray in it which i can use for the airbrush.

The next steps... ahh, my brain again, wasn't able to grab the camera. BUT let me explain. I put hairspray with the airbrush on the wall, tried not to hit the miniature and the ground. Cleaned the airbrush afterwards and waited for the hairspray to dry. Should not take long, the drying - the cleaning should.

After this was fullfilled i took the airbrush again to bring some Jade Green by Citadel at the wall, looking out for some bright areas with mixing in a small amount of Ice blue, not much, gently. Most time i try something gentle something terrible happened: Everything was wet because of the wrong water/colour mixture in the airbrush. Ok, no trouble in the jungle, just a little happy accident: Simply let it dry.

I did so and prepared an old dybrushing brush + a cup of warm water, not hot, while this soup was cooking.

Next Step. Using the old brush to bring some warm water on the wall. Now gently rub the brush over the wall with a tiny amout of using pressure. You lower colour layers (rust) will be viewable. The upper layer rubs off randomly as such weathering do look like in nature. Cool, i thought. Thanks again, Raffa for telling me again. This guy really knows too much. He's too young and makes me feel old - better: he makes the kong feel slow besides such Chapuchin-High-Speed-Jungle-Travel, haha.

Making it wet with warm water and gently stroke your brush over a small area (the one who laughs now will be named childish from now on) - some "at work" photos:

You may even use a toothpick the same way you used the brush, gently:

Do this as often as you like and on places as you like. Do some experiments and let them dry - next picture while drying:

This photo shows the actual state of progress (WIP) after some more weathering and using real rust pigments:

Final words

I know i should have gone further on how i paint this and that, but this article ends here just showing the wall. I don't know why i was so lazy again, working without having my camera ready. Sorry for this point.

I hope this will be inspirational to someone (maybe for the use at a tank instead of a wall), if so, don't mind to say this in a line dropped - that shows that grabbing my camera all the time isn't without a reason :)

If any questions will come up - simply ask.

Keep on happy painting!
Regards
Roman