Hi;

I've tried the 'salt weathering/chipping technique' for the first time and it mostly worked except for this annoying problem.... in the area immediately surrounding a spot where the salt was, the paint seems to be a lighter coulour than the 'unsalted' areas. This produces the unhappy result of brighter swirls of paint around the spots where the salt was, and a darker shade elsewhere. What did I do wrong? i don't have any pictures to post unfortunatley but here's my step by step....

I used acrylic paints. Pollyscale panzer grey airbrushed on for the base coat which dreid for a couple of days. Last night, I hand brushed on some water spots, sprinkled on the salt and let everything dry thoughougly. I then oversprayed with Tamya dark yellow and as the dark yellow dried, I noticed the swirls appearing. I finished airbrushing and let everything dry and then brushed or washed off the salt. The effect of the grey patches showing through the dark yellow overcoat was great and exactly what I had hoped for ecept for the swirls. After it all dired, I sanded everything lightly and it seems to reduce the efrfect and even it all out a bit, but it still shows. Help....

Just slightly , but there's a good dicussion on the whole questio of chipping at FSM

Hello - anyone out there that can help??
The kit is am Italeri Horch 15. I'm painting it to be a panzer grey machine that was repainted and shipped to Africa, hence the dark yellow. I don't want to get into a discussion about whether the paint from 1942 to late spring 1944 really chipped or not, I need help with the technique please.
Anybody.....?

Bob

Hey there Bob,

I feel for you, as I did the same thing the first time I did the salt thing.

The reason you are getting those lighter spots around where the salt is, is because you are using an acylic paint....which is basically a water based paint.

What is happening, is when you paint with the acrylic paint, it actually slightly dissolves the salt as you paint over it, same as putting salt in a glass of water....once the paint dries, the lighter color around the grain of salt is actually the dissolved salt, mixed with the acrylic paint.

Really the only way I have found to get around it, is to use an enamel paint directly over the salt layer. If you are doing a multi camo job, then the other colors on top of the enamel base coat can then be acrylic, as the enamel has already coated over the salt, and therefore the acrylic paint can't dissolve the salt anymore.

Hope that helps!!


PS: Something that I thought about would be, after to put the salt on....why couldn't you put an enamel flat coat to seal in the salt, and then put your acrylic color over the flat coat. The enamel flat coat should give you the same protection as a coat of enamel paint....the only snag I could see, is by sealing in the salt with a flat coat, is that it may make it that much harder to get the salt off once all the paint is dried. Worth a shot though, however I would try it on some scrap plastic first!!!

Thanks Scott, that explains everything. I'm a little happier now just knowing what it was. I should have guessed that would happen, but I just didn't think of it.

I hate airbrushing with enamel thoughs. It's too mush of a mess to clean up for me. My family complains of the odors and the airbrush just never seems to get completely clean like it does when I use acrylics.

Oh well, I'll live with it and try and hide the spots with additional weathering effects like dust and mud. as I said in my initial post, careful light sanding of the dark yellow overcoat seems to reduce the effect substantially, so I'll just keep working at it.

cheers.
Bob

Hi,

I am getting a bit but regarding your enamel airbrush problem: What i do is unscrew the head and put all parts in a glass jar with thinner (I mean the real thinner, the sweet smelling toxic stuff which removes paint). The stuff doesn't destroy any teflon rings, but anything plastic will melt so be careful.

BTW, I also changed from enamel to acrylic myself. Only annoying thing is that if you clean your airbrush with a paper towel the paper will stick to the half dried paint and will eventally end up in your nozzle. aaarrrgh Anybody any ideas how to resolve that problem?

Cheers Matthijs

Hi Bob ...This happened to me too on a Challenger II I was building ...I think Scott is right about the acrylics,but don't give up on it ,I just used the effect in my weathering and after all the washes and filters everything just came together ...You'll see it'll all work out .

Rick

Thanks Rick - that's encouraging...!!