Hey guys!
Just have some questions and would greatly appreciate it if you helped me
Out.

1: After you apply the first coat, then the hairspray and the final coat, does it matter if you chip with water or x-20 tamiya thinner?
2: about how much hairspray should be applied? Two light coats? One heavy coat?

I would suggest if you want to do chipping to use a series of lighter coats, instead of one overall heavy coat.

But I would also like to suggest that while modelling chipping and rust is a great recent (well maybe over 15 years now) fad, it is not really very realistic. But I will state that it is a really wonderfull looking artistic point of our hobby. It has almost nothing to do with what really happens to an AFV in typical combat.

But that is up to you to decide. And I would suggest for what you want, again. Several light coats to get to what you want. And also if you have never used any of the myriad of methods, to practice on something until you have a system that you are confident with.

Hi there,
after initial painting I usually put some protection on ( future in my case ) or if you let it dry long enough, you don't have to worry about a protection, and I would think that 2 ligth coats of hairspray will work better then single heavy one

Once you put your final coat of paint to be chipped, wait just may be 30-45 min before you start chipping using tap water. I never used Tamiya X-20 thinner

And practice is the best way to learn new teqniques

Cheers and good luck

2 light coats of HS will do, then apply several light coats of the final layer that you want to chip. The lighter, more transparent the top base coat is, the easier it is to remove and the smaller the chips would be.

You do not need to actually 'protect' the first coat before the HS layer, never have problems with the first coat being affected even if it just dried. Did that a couple of times using acrylics, dried for an hour..

BUT, spraying a layer of future gives you different results, based on experience that is. eg: if you apply a gloss coat of future then HS after, it is much easier to remove the paint and the chips easily goes with the direction of your brush but it can easily be overdone.