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Just tried it (or started trying it) on some Eliminators left over from... Shadowspear? The boxed set I can't remember exactly which one.

For those of you who have never heard of it...

Prime the area (for this purposes, the cloak)
Paint the "cloak" with water. Dunk in a bowl or sprinkle with coarse salt.
Let it dry.
Airbrush your dark color.
Let dry.
"Paint with water.
Dunk
Paint in next lighter color
Rinse/Repeat based on number of colors.
Use a brush to gently knock the salt off.

Having given it a try, I think it can be an awesome little trick.
My first impression is: don't skimp on the salt. The airbrush will knock some off. Oversalt, let the airbrush knock some off.
My timing is off. I didn't see this technique until "too late". I'm going from dark to light. This still works so far. But it's likely to make my "main" color lighter than darker.
I may fudge my next round, or the round after and go dark.

There may be a a step to seive the salt, or better version of salt. Or the cheap store brand may not be the right choice. There's a fair bit of finer salt powder in with the larger crystals you're looking for to obscure to form your digital pattern.

I took one of the models and brushed the salt off to get a better idea of salt to results -

This is one pass instead of two or more. The first pic is about the level of salt i was putting on, the second you can see the pattern emerge.

That looks good! Do you plan on going back over it with other colours? Because a couple of layers of that and you'd have a really effective camo going on.


I've also used salt weathering on my Imperial Knight. It's a really good method of getting a nice well-worn effect, that's relatively low on effort.


More pictures in my gallery if you want more angles/close ups.


From my experiences with it.
-Rock salt is the way to go. Buy a bag, grind it up in a pestle & mortar. Or stick it in a zip-lock bag and bash it with a hammer. This lets you get a wide range of variance in size and shape of the salt. Which in turn gives you a more natural appearance to the weathering.

-I found hairspray works better then water, especially with the larger chunks of rock salt, which tend to fall off once the water dries a bit.

-I used rattle cans instead of an airbrush and I also had it blow salt off. Luckily I was going for a heavily weathered effect, so I'd already over-salted. But it is something to be aware of depending on how beat up you're aiming for.

-I used a grey primer so that once weathered, it would look like the paint had stripped back to bare ceramite. And while I am happy with the final look of it, it does kinda look like I just weathered straight on bare plastic. So that is also something to be aware of as well.
If you want to primer grey, then you could remedy this by giving the model a light dusting of black to help add in some tonal variation. This would work either with a rattle can or an air brush. Although you would certainly have more control with an airbrush. This is what i'd do if I ever painted up another Knight in this colour scheme.


It's a great technique and definitely one I recommend people try.

Oh the plan is to go back and do it right, this was my first run, so this was an experiment.