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Hey ladies and gents, I hope all is well! As the title states, I had a few questions regarding the hairspray weathering technique. I'm in the midst of painting a rather large commission and they need to be heavily weathered. I have never used the hairspray technique before, so I was wondering the following:

1.) is there a specific type of hairspray that works best? A brand or formula I should try to use?

2.) Does the hairspray need thinned at all to spray through an airbrush? If so, what should I use?

3.) Once I lay down the hairspray, how many layers of paint can I spray before the technique won't work properly? ie - I'm looking to lay down two to three coats of zenithal highlighting before actually rubbing off the paint for weathering. Will this work?

I know this is a lot of abstraction, but any help you can offer would be greatly appreciated. Thank you in advance.

I had not used it either but I watched the videos by Massive Voodoo and Girlpainting on Youtube. They both demonstrate the hairspray and hairspray/salt techniques. I did not spray the hairspray on from the bottle/can or the airbrush but simply put some in a cup and then brushed it on where I wanted it. I used rock salt rather than table salt as its a larger size. I found that leaving your primer and rust layers to dry over night was the best option to avoid peeling them up when you start to strip the base coats. Ordinary hairspray, no thinning.

Here are my results of a Deff Dread I am working on. Hope that helps.

Black primer and start of rust base coat.


More shades of brown, rust, and silver sponged on. Hairspray and salt over this where you want weathering.


Base coat, highlights, and shading over the salt/hairspray.


After stripping with stiff brush and hot water. I dipped the brush in the hot water and slopped it on. In some instances, I dipped the whole part in the hot water for a bit which was very effective if you want larger chunks to come off.



Links to weathering vids I watched.

http://youtu.be/04RMOchGAS8 - part 1 of 2
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRt_Pp_n_II part 1 of 4

I used the cheapest brand at the store, aqua net super hold i think. i decanted it. which means sprayed through a straw into a second vessel and then sprayed the hairspray through the airbrush. sprayed tamiya deck tan over it. here it is.

All the gunk and little black things are from the paint brush I chose. This set of stairs has become my guinea pig and I used it for this test. If you can see shiny bits where its scraped away its because I used this same set of stairs as a test for spraying GW leadbelcher through an airbrush.