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I bought crackle medium a few years ago hoping to be able to achieve the effect you see above - it never worked.

Do any of you guys have experience creating that effect on your models? How's it done? Am I just using it incorrectly?

Cheers,

Try mixing your paint with elmers glue (white PVA glue) that isn't watered down. Put it on a test model and let it dry. Experiment with different radios and also experiment with letting it dry overnight and using an artificial dryer such as a hairdrier or putting it in front of a fan.

Hard to say. I've only ever used crackle medium at a larger scale. While the effect can be controlled, to a degree (thickness of application, usually, determines the tightness of the crackle pattern), it's random by nature. I'd anticipate a lot of trial and error before you got exactly what you wanted. Crackle medium won't necessarily give you the lifting and peeling effect present in that picture, either - the differential shrinkage that causes the cracks to form is in one plane, so any bubbling or curling is a chance occurrence.

I almost feel like manually applying a pattern of scratches and chips using the hairspray method would be more practical, laborious as it would be. Sponging on the topcoat with near-full coverage would be a faster option, but the effect would be somewhat less convincing.

I never used a product intended for it, but I have done cracked armor.

On this terminator I did:
- black basecoat
- red gore to rough out the blocks
- then I worked the highlights up through scab red, blood red, blood angels red
- washed in chestnut and red washes
- highlighted some more along the edges... you just kind of create your own 3D with them, so you don't really highlight all of the edges of each block, just imagine which edge might be raised and hit that one.

Now, my example was ceramite... so I looked at it as if you had a bunch of shattered tiles or an irregular mosaic. With your car paint example, you may want to highlight more of the edges than I did as the paint kind of curls and lifts along many sides at once, but the technique should work.

Crackle medium is a tough cookie to play with at the scale we use it at. As stated above, get your trial and error notebook ready, and a couple spare pencils (with erasers!)

Grab a few different acrylic crackle mediums, read the directions, and get going on a few spare shoulder pads or some-such.

Good luck dude, I didn't succeed, then again I gave up a tad easy on this 1.

fenrir1997 wrote:Crackle medium is a tough cookie to play with at the scale we use it at. As stated above, get your trial and error notebook ready, and a couple spare pencils (with erasers!)

Grab a few different acrylic crackle mediums, read the directions, and get going on a few spare shoulder pads or some-such.

Good luck dude, I didn't succeed, then again I gave up a tad easy on this 1.

Same as this really! I bought it and played with it for ages, managed to get a kneepad to crackle but nothing since!

Somehow I feel like the owner of that car was not trying to achieve the crackled paint effect

Too much flow improver in paint makes it crackle like that. its made worse if the paint is thinned.

I would say test it out try thinning a paint with just 100% flow improver , like at 1 to 1 or even 2 to 1 ratios of improver to paint.