I was just wondering what you think of these spare track links I painted today. This was my first time doing rusted spare links. They are Friulmodel Tiger I Mid/Late spare links for my Cyber-Hobby Tiger I MID. All I did was put them in AK Burnishing fluid and painted with well thinned random applications of the 5 rust colors in the AK Interactive rust set going from lightest to darkest. What do you think?

Looks really good.

I think they look good.

Looks great! The only thing I'm not sure about - and this might be caused by the lights - is the greenish rust. I don't think this could naturally form on track links...

Yeah, it's probably either the lighting or possibly the fact that I took the picture on a green mat...I orginally planned on using some rust toned pigments but they came out pretty good without...I have a history of making things complicated and trying to do too much and usually end up making things worse...do you think I should add some pigments? I suppose I could just fix them with white spirit and just remove the pigments if I wasn't happy. Do you have any suggestions as to how I could make these links better? I've never tried rusting spare links before and welcome all the critique and suggestions because my goal is to keep getting better...one thing I wasn't happy with is the large reddish blotch on one of the links...kind of stands out don't you think...

You can try the pigments on just a few links and wipe them off if you're not happy with the result. Without a fixer, pigments can be removed rather easily.

Personally, I would only use pigments on spare tracks that are placed on the vehicle hull because you can form some texture using pigments, too. For the working tracks, a rusty wash normally does the trick.

Take this with a grain of salt, tough. I'm not a pro myself!

Another piece of info regarding rust I like to consider: steel parts have nickel and other metals in them, part of what makes steel "steel", and nickel, as an example, tends corrode at a much slower rate than iron. Stowed tracks, depending on the composition of the steel they're made from, may not show as much rust as an un-used cast iron skillet, for instance. And due to the constant contact with the ground and running gear, working tracks will show little to no rust, depending on terrain (sand polishes things very quickly, for instance).
My rule of thumb: less is best.