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I saw a post on Facebook about a guy who ruined his paints because he put carbon steel microbearings (tiny bbs) into them as mixing balls. If you were to do this with a water based medium like GW technical would it make a servicable rust wash or technical effect, or would it just make a mess?

I'm sure it would make a mess. There are GW technical paint for rust effects, though.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=px18NSorf1g

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nN1tu4pSSig

Best way I've found to do rust with citadel paints is ryza rust, then washed over with thinned doombull brown whilst the ryza is still wet. When it's dry, stipple leadbelcher over the top. Really easy and gives a decent looking end result.

If you're doing rust on large surfaces I recommend the good old salt and hairspray trick. If you have an airbrush this is hard to beat.

Prime - Black like your soul, or grey
Base coat in umber maybe another medium brown highlight
Stipple sporadically in any rusty orange
Overcoat in satin varnish to protect your rust
Apply a heavy coat of run of the mill hair spray and apply salt to areas that you will want to be rusty while the hairspray is drying
Apply desired topcoat you can do all the shading highlighting as you normally would
Apply warm water once dry which will dissolve the salt you can also carefully scrape away your top coat to reveal rusty patches underneath
Overcoat in varnish to protect all your work

You can keep going with oils and pigments depending how foul you want to get. Also it depends how much time you want to put into your piece but what you're paying for GW stuff I'd say you want it to look awesome.


This guy, Luca Zampriolo is a battle damage god who mostly does gundams but his technique is onpoint:

Just like using actual rocks as basing looks bad, using actual rust stands out too much from the rest of the model.

 nurgleguy wrote:
If you're doing rust on large surfaces I recommend the good old salt and hairspray trick. If you have an airbrush this is hard to beat.

Its a cool effect but all that white stuff doesn't really look like rust... but more like oxidation/weathering.

The white is actually the top coat and base color of his model.

Im pretty sure it would kinda make a mess.
Though maybe not.

I have seen some people put steel wool in a tub with water and a bit of bleach to oxidize it faster. but its not used like paint.

they let it dry then use the powerder for basing.

It would be easier and faster to just buy dry pigments in rust and oranges.

painting and chipping as above also works well too.

Having used and abused just about every rust technique going, I'm back to good ol' brown and orange paint, stippled where I want 'em and then given a couple of washes before hitting up with the metal again. Clean, quick, easy to control.

Used here:


And more recently here:

I absolutely have to agree with Winterdyne.

I have used pigments, weathering sticks, salt sprays, everything people suggest for rust, but any rusting that I have done recently has all been with brown and orange paints.

 Snoopdeville3 wrote:

 nurgleguy wrote:
If you're doing rust on large surfaces I recommend the good old salt and hairspray trick. If you have an airbrush this is hard to beat.

Its a cool effect but all that white stuff doesn't really look like rust... but more like oxidation/weathering.

The white (salt) is not meant to be the rust, that's an intermediate step where he has based brown, applied the salt and then airbrush the basecoat.

After that you wash/brush off the salt and it shows the brown underlayer which simulates rusted portions (this is the final image)

Salt and hairspray techniques are sometimes useful on vehicles, especially if you want a very distressed finish, but often, especially for gaming models sponge-stippling is faster and simpler for that sort of effect.

Horses for courses, really.

Especially for small areas like rifles, las guns etc. I find that a VERY light and spotty drybrush/stippling of black followed by bestial brown over the same areas looks great, is easy to do and more controlled than most techniques.