HOBBY: Quick & Easy Battle Damage by Jawaballs!
Who’s up for a painting tutorial? Lets knock around some Blood Angels tanks with an easy weathering technique anyone can master!
Hey all, Jawaballs here! As most of you know, I offer a lot of painting tutorials that I like to say will teach any one to paint. One thing that has made my tutorials a success is that I try to break down the mystery of painting and display it in a way that any non painter can understand. I pride myself on creating tutorials with the nooby in mind and showing you guys the product of my beginners trial and error so that you don’t have to figure it out yourself. Most of you just don’t have the time.
With my new Jawababy, I have found time to be a commodity that I can ill afford to waste. So believe me, I have an appreciation for what you are all going through when you try to get your models painted.
With that in mind, here is a quick and easy tutorial for painting battle damage on your tank. This is great for finishing your most recent model, or even better, revitalizing an old paint job to bring it more in line with what you have done recently. Such is the case with me. The tank in the pictures was one of the first red tanks I ever painted. It is woefully behind my more recent paintjobs. The battle damage is a nice way to unify this tank to the rest of my army.
Step One:
Paint your tank normally. Highlight it, do hand painting, apply decals. Finish your tank. In my first pics you can see my mostly finished Rhino. Take note of the skull decal. The weathering effect will actually go over it, enhancing the look.
Step Two:
Using just a tiny bit of Chaos Black on the tip of a detail brush, drag it over the edges you wish to weather. Pick obvious parts to weather… the armor just above the tank treads, the leading edges of the front armor, the edge of the visor and headlight hood. Follow the shape of the edge with a line first, then paint jagged points off the line. If you want, make the edges look sort of like a heart monitor… smaller ‘flares’ at the ends of the line with longer flares at the center. Look at the leading edge of the front armor plate for an example. Make sure that if your plate slopes in two directions that you wrap the “damage” around the edge, with flares going in both directions. Start small, and do just a few edges for now until you decide if you like the look.
Step Three:
I used Chainmail for this. But Boltgun also works. Don’t use Mithril, you may want to use that later as a highlight.
Go over your black “flares”. Start at the edge, then flare out to the peaks of the black you painted. But make the silver flares slightly different then the black ones, and do not go out to the very edge of the black. Leave some of the black showing. And actually, vary the width of the black. Leave some thick areas of black with just a little bit of silver in some spots, and in others go almost to the edge of black. This will create uneven wear, and if you are lucky, make it look like the red paint is actually peeling up! The thicker black parts will actually look like shadow. This simulates the red paint, and the black undercoat being blasted or worn through, with some of the bare metal exposed.
In the last picture you see a great example of this in the very bottom damage part. Note how the silver flares out, but some of the black spikes very low. While at the same time some of the silver actually touches the red. Also, look how the damage wears over the skull decal. I may even go back and further enhance that area of damage to more obscure the skull.
This is a bit of artistic slight of hand. Varying the thickness of the black creates depth.
And that is that! If you are a perfectionist, you can use mithril silver to do a second silver flare, even smaller then the first. Or just lightly hit the silver edges with it as a highlight.
~Maybe some of you can share some of your weathering and damage painting experiments? What has worked for you to create battle damage?
