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I was reading Dave Taylor's always enjoyable blog and was perusing his latest post about the results of salt weathering the tanks for the Steel Legion army he's building for the Heroes of Armageddon (http://davetaylorminiatures.blogspot.com/2011/06/steel-legion-tank-detailing-heroes-of.html#comment-form). And as I did, I started thinking, as I often do when I see salt weathering, "Wouldn't it be easier and faster to paint on the rust and get a very similar effect?"

I think that salt weathering can be an effective and irreplaceable technique for weathering things like Ork or Chaos (esp. Nurgle) vehicles, where you're really wanting to show the layers of paint that have worn away due to misuse, abuse, and neglect. Typically, I think it is best done when you're revealing large amounts of surface area of the rusted underlayer - not necessarily in huge clumps, but the overall surface area is pitted and rusted.

In a case like Dave has shown in his blog, though, they basecoated, hairsprayed, and salted 13 tanks - that's a lot of paint and a lot of time and effort spent on that step. This appeared to be the most weathered tank:



Don't get me wrong, I'm a big fan of Dave Taylor's stuff, and frankly this looks better than anything I've ever produced, but it seems like his time would've been better spent painting and weathering the tanks normally, especially considering that after cleaning off the salt, he still went back and touched up the rust. I mean, it seems silly to me to do this when 95% of that basecoat you laid down is never going to see the light of day.

For folks out there who have used the salt weathering method - do you really feel it's worth it? Do you do it regularly with your vehicles? Or is it something you tried once and decided not to do again?

I did it on this one, using water rather than hairspray.

Sprayed grey primer.
Painted red oxide on the areas I planned to rust.
Sprinkled water on it.
Sprinkled coarse sea salt on it.
Basecoat spray
Wash off the salt.
More weathering with inks and drybrushing.

I think it came out rather well. The close-up of the turret shows how the paint is bubbled up in places.



I would do it again.

Death By Monkeys wrote:Typically, I think it is best done when you're revealing large amounts of surface area of the rusted underlayer - not necessarily in huge clumps, but the overall surface area is pitted and rusted.

It's the speedy alternative when you are doing large reveals, liquid mask works well for this too.

I'll agree with you if that was the most weathered tank of the 13 it seems like time could have been better spent and gotten the same results.

Depends too on how good you are at painting rust - for a lot of people, their 'rust' looks like what it is, brown paint splodged unconvincingly on. With some practice, the salt technique is more likely to give a reliable convincing effect.

Clang wrote:Depends too on how good you are at painting rust - for a lot of people, their 'rust' looks like what it is, brown paint splodged unconvincingly on. With some practice, the salt technique is more likely to give a reliable convincing effect.

This really ^
salt weathering looks more random and more realistic compared to doing it with a brush.

EDIT: 1000th post!

I've done it on a few SW Rhinos I've got sitting around, about to start airbrushing the primary color onto a Razorback (primed with rust, then salted, now my grey/blue color).

I can't paint weathering for *#&$, so I'm a bit biased for this approach, but it doesn't look bad when done in moderation.