[Serpiko]

9) Now that the main shading is done, it's decals time! While applying them, you should keep your model as "dry" as possible, in order to avoid ruining the previous work. To remove any excess of water, gently tap it with a cloth or toilet paper, and absolutely do NOT swipe!

You may consider sealing the shades with a coat of transparent paint before applying decals, but I prefer not to do that, and rather apply the sealing layer only when all the weathering is done. This is to prevent multiple paint layers from creating a different surface, that would "react" differently under dry brush strokes (thus making it harder or impossible to make further additions/corrections). In this case, since we're working on both camouflaged and bare metal surfaces, that would be very annoying.



10) With the charcoal pencil, you can redraw the underneath panel lines over large decals. Just don't sharpen the pencil too much, or you're going to rip them open! Then, by simply tapping with your finger you should be able to blur the lines a bit.



11) And now, here we go with the "dirty" job! As with shading, dry brushing with charcoal powder gives excellent results in reproducing blurred smoke stains, be them engine exhausts, shell ejection ports, or similar. No refrains here, go as heavy as you want your model to be dirty! And again, you can easily remove any undesired excess and retry.



12) By dipping a wet tootpick tip into the charcoal powder, you can draw tinier and sharper details, such as fuel stains pouring out from tank refueling caps.



13) There it is. The weathering job is done, and it has been sealed by transparent paint. Matt paint was used on the camouflaged areas, while bare metal surfaces were painted with a semi-gloss one, in order to furtherly highlight the different look.

VERY IMPORTANT:

Applying the transparent layer is a crucial step requiring particular care, because it's a "no-going-back" work, whose outcome is threatened by a few "traps":

- So far, all the shading/weathering has been done with "dry" powder. If you already tried this technique, you should have experienced how easy it is to wipe it off, expecially with water. This becomes a problem now, since brush strokes with wet paint may alter or even delete powder marks. As long as you use a hand brush, there's no way to avoid this risk: in order to minimize it, the only way is to go easy with the brush. Dilute the paint a little, to make it easier to spread, then apply it as softly and regularly as possible, trying to avoid multiple strokes on the same point; and once again move the brush according to the direction of the airflow, so that any undesired charcoal "trail" will turn into nothing more than a slightly longer dirt stain.

- No matter how careful you are, the wet brush will "pick up" at least a little bit of charcoal (expecially from larger and darker stains) and mix it with the paint. This means that (A) the whole "transparent" layer will actually have a slightly darkening tint; (B) you should be careful and clean up the brush a bit after painting over the dirtiest zones, in order to avoid ending up with undesired darker areas; © should you ever need to redo and/or "patch" a particular spot later, it will be a pain in the [bottom] to match the same tinting.

- If, despite your efforts, part of the shading/weathering got lost after painting, it is still possible to try and redraw it; but, as I said above, painted surfaces may now behave differently when getting dry brushed. For example, the job will probably be quite easy on matt areas, while semi-gloss ones will now be harder to effectively dirt up and more likely to lose detail while applying a further sealing layer.

Unfortunately, if you end up with the "transparent" coat showing undesired dark spots or trails, they will be almost impossible to remove.



14) Matt colors are supposed to have been used to paint anything on the plane: therefore, after painting the semi-gloss coat on the bare metal areas, a matt transparent layer has been applied on decals only (but the tiniest stencils). Since I have bad experiences with masking tape ripping off decals despite any caution, I did this job without masking, following decals edges with brush tip; hence the somewhat uneven look of the paint. If anyone asks, I'm stating that's intentionally done to recreate paint deterioration due to sunlight! :mrgreen:



15) The final touch: dirt stains are supposed to look dirty (you don't say? ), but the ones on bare metal areas are now covered with semi-gloss paint. If you want them to look opaque, pick a small piece of sponge, soak it into water (not too much), then dip it slightly into matt transparent paint. This way, by tapping with the sponge along the stains on the model, you can apply a small amount of very diluted matt paint which, once dried, will give to dirt areas an adequately opaque look in contrast to the surrounding "clean" gloss surfaces. Obviously, stains on already opaque surfaces don't need this treatment.


That's it! These are the techniques that I've exploited so far with this model. Should I experiment something new (and if that works, of course) I'll try and show how to do that in other posts. Stay well, and keep on modeling!