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I'm not much of a weatherer frankly and decided to do this to challenge myself. What do I weather black with? I feel like it I just hit edges with a metallic flake silver of some type it just wouldn't look as good as using something else to show some depth. Any suggestions on some non-metal flake weathering to make this thing come out more used looking? Thanks in advance!

Use a light grey wash in your panel lines. Or you could use a khaki to match that dust. Take a pencil and rub the graphite on your edges to create subtle wear. Maybe add a few subtle streaks from your rivets.

I will say though that as a general rule you should finish painting your model fully, and apply any decals before moving onto weathering. Like the real thing.

The problem is that you went too dark and uniform with the black and now that you've added weathering layers on top of it your only real option is to strip the model and start over. You want to start with a base coat that has some variation in it: darker areas where there are shadows, lighter highlights, some fading and texture where the paint isn't completely uniform, etc. This means aiming for a base color that's a dark gray and only hits a true black in the deepest shadows. This gives you room to add washes in the shadows, dirt/oil streaks/etc on top of the base color, chipping on the edges that's a true black, etc. Get some scrap hull pieces and test your scheme before moving on to the real model. Then you can try out various metallic colors for edge chips, or dark red/brown, pure black, another gray shade, etc.

PS: drill your barrels and exhaust holes.

Typhus Corrosion comes up nice on black. Ends up sort of grey like engine grime.

With black, it's a bit of a stylistic choice you need to make. If you're going for realism, you should probably not base coat with pure black, but something JUST shy of it. Then you can make black chips in the armor that look like shadows, and highlight the bottom edge of it.

I suppose you also need to decide if your battle damage is fresh, or old, or what the material under the paint even is to begin with. Let's say you imagine your tank is some kind of steel, so if you want fresh damage, just a few brushed (not drybrushed) on paint chips using a silver. Hit the bottom edge of where your silver chips end with your highlight color. Older damage could be rust colored with some rust streaks going down. For dirt and grime, typhus corrosion dabbed where you think dirt would settle works really well. Personally, I am a "less is more" type of guy. I see people really slather on the dirt and grime, and I don't think it looks very good for 40k stuff. You lose a lot of the asthetic, I think, that 40k is about.

If you go pure black, which I like to do with space marine stuff because it's already a bit cartoony, you'll obviously be doing a ton of edge highlighting. Use your edge highlight color for scratches. On edges and corners, draw a scratch with your highlight color, then where it intersects with your edge highlight, make it black. Kind of hard to explain so I'll show you what I did with my Repulsor just last night:



I also used a sponge with black on some of the decals/stripes to show some paint chips.

The way I imagine my vehicles is that they've seen some action, but they're regularly cleaned and annointed with sacred oils by techmarines, so there's no buildup of grime on these machines that are blessed by the omnissiah.

For practice, I recommend you take a spare bit like a hatch or something from a rhino (which most people have if they're building SM vehicles) and play around.

Looks like some great tips. My biggest take away is no pure black, which actually helps a ton.

@Peregrine - would you recommend something like preshading to achieve shadows in the recesses? Or base the whole thing gray and then go back to add the shadows and depth?

@Quasi - big thanks for sharing a pic of your take on the weathering. I guess it makes sense marine vehicles get a pretty regular bath. I always just pictured black templars slogging around a while generally being "stuck in" longer than other chapters due to their love of close combat and long crusades etc BTW what is that edge highlight color you're using there? Is that close to a space wolf grey? It looks like it's got a hint of blue to it which I like over the black.

Thunderhawk blue.

There's actually another lighter highlight color--it's a very light "icy" blue by P3 and I can't remember the name--could be Frostbite?. I use it on the sharpest corners, such as where two edges meet, or where one of my scratches goes around a corner. If you zoom in close you can see it more clearly. I've found that this extra step makes a pretty huge difference when looking at the model in person, actually, and it's really quick to do.

I've started a thread where I'll be posting pictures of my painted models. I've got lots of Deathwatch, but I do mine more "clean" looking, as I said. I recently finished my Intercessors, Inceptors, Aggressors, and Hellblasters, and I did a really quick and light drybrush of brown dust on their boots with the same color I drybrushed my bases. It's very subtle and makes it look natural with the base, without looking like they're marines that were buried in mud since the Horus Heresy. I'll try to remember to take pictures tonight.

Just remember that weathering is kind of a stylistic choice and it's easy to go overboard, so be careful. I remember Bob Ross painting back in the day--he'd paint a base shadow color then hightlight. When doing his highlight colors he'd always say something like "be careful, you get to having so much fun that you don't know when to stop!" He said this because if you do too much highlighting over your shadow color, you lose the shadows and contrast.

I figure weathering is similar--if you go too far you lose what it is you're weathering, and it just looks like something you dug up from a swamp or something.

You get some metallic paint and edge highlight a few small sections. You can also get anthrax earthshade ish things. One last option is to get brown powder and some how stick that on in places.