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G'day all, I am trying to move forward in my repertoire of techniques and am planning on doing a highly weathered Imprial Guard army. As I near the end of construction (building 1750 points of stuff including from third parties takes a while...) I am now considering some of the practicalities.

I am looking at a two-tone colour scheme, how many coats can I put over the salt/chipping fluid before it won't flake away/chip? I'm not planning on drowning it (and am using an airbrush) but how thick is too thick?

For the salt you can put as many layers as you want since the salt will always rub off fine but in my experience about 3 airbrushed tones (intermediate blue -> grey -> white) works just fine (ak interactive chipping fluid).

Here is an example of mine.

I have use both the hairspray/salt technique and chipping fluid.

With the salt technique, I sprayed some hairspray into a cup and used a brush to apply it where I wanted with a sprinkle of large grain salt (sea salt) where I wanted it. The effect was small chips and I it looked good. The down side is trying to dislodge the salt that you just painted a base coat cover, It takes quite a bit of water and some forceful scrubbing with a stiff paintbrush to get it off sometimes. Occassionally, you will get a sparkly/glitter-like effect from some salt residue left behind after it dries but it will come off.

I used Chipping fluid from AV. The chips are generally larger and require a bit of planning for where you want them to be beforehand.

Both methods benefit from a base undercoat of rust color and/or primer that has dried entirely before actually revealing the chips as you don't want to weather right down to the bare plastic or metal.

Although in German, I recommend watch Voodoo with his tutorials. I believe he does two variants of the hairspray method. There are 4 parts but well worth the time. https://youtu.be/LRt_Pp_n_II

You dont need to use hairspray and salt at the same time.. Water works fine to affix your salt. The basic method i use it, spray a brown undercoat. Use duff old brushes, sponges or whatever to apply different shades of rust. Apply a mix of different sized salt granules, then apply your colour. You can also enhance the effect by using a crackle paint like agrellan earth around the parts that are chipped off. Search youtube for salt Weathering. There are good tutorials on there. Never used the hairspray technique myself

See ive used hairspray and salt, its true water will work to fix it just fine, but the benefits of salt and hairspray imo is that it allows you to flake where the salt is and then scratch where theres only hairspray. So you can achieve a scratch and weather effect (as erosion over time and instanteous gashes are both ways paint could be removed IRL).

However I have just moved onto chipping fluid myself, keen to give it a go and wee what the differences are.

Thanks for all the repies guys, these are useful opinions. At the moment the aim is:

Grey primer > Rust spray > chipping fluid > selective salt application > 2 tone camouflage > weather, and it looks like I am in the right ball park.

Cheers!

If you use chipping fluid you wont need to then do salt afterwards. I suppose you could, in order to get the flakey salt effect. But the point of the chipping fluid is so that afterwards all you need to do is go at it

Solar Shock wrote:
If you use chipping fluid you wont need to then do salt afterwards. I suppose you could, in order to get the flakey salt effect. But the point of the chipping fluid is so that afterwards all you need to do is go at it

My main thought about that (and I'm happy to be wrong) was that the salt would be great for exposed edges and corners, but that the chipping fluid might be better for things like hinges, which are akard to get into... Thoughts?


Automatically Appended Next Post:

wtnind wrote:
For the salt you can put as many layers as you want since the salt will always rub off fine but in my experience about 3 airbrushed tones (intermediate blue -> grey -> white) works just fine (ak interactive chipping fluid).

Here is an example of mine.

That crackle medium looks ace, I would never have thought of doing that!

Hmm, I see what your saying give it a go, i dont see why it wouldn't work. Although the point of the fluid is that it makes it easy to do chipping where ever you apply it, so if you apply it to the entire model then you can chip where ever you like!

do you airbrush? Because if you put the fluid everywhere then once you've done all the chipping all you need do is seal it up to prevent it chipping anywhere else.

Solar Shock wrote:
Hmm, I see what your saying give it a go, i dont see why it wouldn't work. Although the point of the fluid is that it makes it easy to do chipping where ever you apply it, so if you apply it to the entire model then you can chip where ever you like!

do you airbrush? Because if you put the fluid everywhere then once you've done all the chipping all you need do is seal it up to prevent it chipping anywhere else.

Yes I do airbrush! well, baby steps. This is army number 3 with the air brush, so we'll see how I go... A friend was getting rid of some re-cast rhinos he'd been given, and has given me two to use as test pieces, so I will try both chipping+salt, and just chipping fluid to see how that works out. I'll post up results when I'm done.

Cheers!

 goblinzz wrote:

Solar Shock wrote:
Hmm, I see what your saying give it a go, i dont see why it wouldn't work. Although the point of the fluid is that it makes it easy to do chipping where ever you apply it, so if you apply it to the entire model then you can chip where ever you like!

do you airbrush? Because if you put the fluid everywhere then once you've done all the chipping all you need do is seal it up to prevent it chipping anywhere else.

Yes I do airbrush! well, baby steps. This is army number 3 with the air brush, so we'll see how I go... A friend was getting rid of some re-cast rhinos he'd been given, and has given me two to use as test pieces, so I will try both chipping+salt, and just chipping fluid to see how that works out. I'll post up results when I'm done.

Cheers!

I like using a chipping fluid as well as salt, a sprinkling of salt crystals will make for more consistent smaller holes of rust while the chipping medium creates bigger ragged tears and smaller thinner scratch lines. But creating speckles of rust with the chipper alone would take ages.