Weathering and Battle damaging 40k Tanks: Part Two

Here it is.  The article you've all been waiting for.  Painting your battle worn tanks.  I have had more people coming to me and harassing me to complete this series than any other. Sorry for the delay.

At the end of the last article I suggested that you under coat your chosen vehicle in Chaos black, so it should look something like the above.  The next stage is to do the base coat.  I personally do not currently own a Spray gun or an air brush, so I have hand basecoated the model.  If you do have access to one of these I highly recommend you use it.  That said there are benefits to using a brush.  For one thing you don't need to mask things off if you want the to stay black.

Right, first things first.  If you are going to hand base coat the model the first thing you will need is a really big Brush.  I used a Citadel Large Drybrush.

Go through and dry brush the tracks and anything else you want metallic with Boltgun metal.

Now, not to belabour the point,  the one i make every time I give out painting advice.  WATER DOWN YOUR PAINTS!.  It's important to do this with any model but it is even more important with tanks.  You will be laying down a lot of paint in one hit so if the paint isn't watered down say goodbye to all the detail.  If  you have to do more layers to get good cover so be it.  I went with a 2:1 ratio paint to water.
 

Paint all the basic colour areas of the model in the base colour of your choice.  I used Knarloc Green for this one.  I also basecoated the Dozer blade at this time, but I forgot to take a pic of it.

Next,  I basically drowned the model in Badab Black wash.  Don't be afraid to really pile it on. you want to get a pretty muckey look in the end and this will help give your paint work a basis for the patchy weathered paint job we're after.







So far so good.  Now if I wanted to take this to a pristine finish this would be where we go back and do cover coats and highlighting, but this is a beast of war! No pristine polish will grace it's form.  So now we go straight into a nice heavy layer of rust.

First up, get your self a nice manky brush with stiff bristles.  I used a drybrush which i'd forgotten to wash properly after using it with PVA glue, but a better option would be a proper Citadel Stippling Brush.


Get yourself some Solar Macharius Orange and water it down a bunch then apply it to the model using a fairly vigorous stabbing motion so that the paint blobs and splatters onto the surface on the model.


Once this first layer has dryed go through and do it again with a different orange. In this case Blazing Orange.

The key with the stippling is you want things to look rough and patchy, so the first layer of orange should be visible in patches.

Now we move on to the metallics.

This time we want to use a combination of stippling and Drybrushing.  The Drybrushing is used to make sure that areas which would recieve a lot of wear and tear are nice and shiny.  So the teeth on the dozer blade received the heavy treatment.
 





Finally we want some evidence of paint which has not yet been worn away.  To achieve this first give the model a nice soothing bash in your finest Devlan Mud wash.  Then stipple your base colour back on while the wash is still a bit wet.

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This will leave your model with the finish below.  Give any battle damaged areas a little going over with the bolt gun metal to make them stand out and you're good to go.

Next time out we get onto the dirty tricks and non paint techniques. Oh and how to paint the Melta damage

Till then, Have fun with what we've covered so far.