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So I picked up three Eldar grav tanks at a ridiculous price at Kubla Con the other weekend ($15!) and one tank has been hand painted blue, and has some noticeable cracks (I think someone stepped on the hull). They're not yet glued together, and I'm going for the red (sort of Saim-Hann-ish) and I didn't bother sanding down the blue-painted tank. So it's got cracks and a lumpy-ish coat of sprayed on red paint. Which makes it a definite candidate for a veteran of many, many battles, probably who hasn't had the time since their last battle to swap out their worn parts.

A quick search on "weathering eldar" got only mockery. Seems the consensus is that Eldar *aren't* weathered. Well, this guy will be.

I was thinking of streaking watered down nuln oil from the crack along the hull to simulate an oil leak at high speeds, I've never really done weathering before, and certainly not on a sexy little tank like the Eldar have.

Any thoughts or links to tutorials to help with weathering/making battle-worn these odd looking battle tanks would be most appreciated.

Good luck with your weathering project hopefully it turns out nice.
That said I'm going to go with the general consensus that Eldar wouldnt be caught dead in a heavily damaged and weathered vehicle, They operate shields and holofields as protection from being hit in the first place, in the event that those safeguards fail I would expect the grav tank to be going down as they dont have the look of being able to sustain heavy damage and carry on like an ork vehicle does.

I could only imagine that any damage seen on an Eldar vehicle is going to be really freshly made during the battle being played and that theyd never turn up on something thats nackered already.

If you wanted to fix up your tank and make the lines clean, remove the cracks etc, then I suggest milliput as a filler, its very easy to sand comapred to greenstuff.
Strip the model first down the as much bare plastic as possible and then go about glueing broken pieces together and filling cracks/holes with milliput and then sanding it back smooth to hide the repair work. Adding multiple layers if its still visible after one pass. (the trick is to over fill and then sand it back rather than to try and fill it and shape perfectly in one pass.

Another idea might be to make terrain from it in way of a wrecked grav tank, it could be a good objective marker or have misisons based around it, or simple be cover on the batlefield
Forge world are doing a crashed thunderhawk realm of battle piece, something like that (in a much less grand scale) might work well.

I've only seen Eldar weathered a few times, but they look AWESOME, so who cares if it's not fluffy?

Some examples:


EDIT: fixed images.

Thanks guys!

@Hairysticks: While I appreciate the sentiment, this is a pretty beat up model, and I just don't quite have the energy it would take to fill gaps and sand away the imperfections to make this baby look like the holoshields were full operational... And I'm not yet to the point where I feel I can "wreck" a model to make it an objective marker. I theory I like the idea... But what if I need to run that grav tank in a last ditch, desperate defense of some as-yet-unknown objective! I might *need* that model!!

@ProAm: great photos. I think that's what I'll have to try for... I have a stipling brush (that I have very little experience with) and can rip up some sponge.

Does anyone have any advice or personal preference for laying down the initial black foundation with a stippler, or a sponge? I assume next up would be something like bestial brown, followed by orange, with the edges hit with a sliver metallic paint. Then wash it down with red (to blend nicely with the red paint scheme I'm going with, a bit like the third falcon show above) or diluted black.

Sounds easy enough. Hahahahaha!