Easiest colour to weather/scratch/damage?

[Valkyrion]

I want to try my hand at a bit of weathering and was wondering if there's an 'easy' base colour to practice on, or are they all much of a muchness?

[Durus]

Depends on how you want to weather something and what color it is. As a rule of thumb I'd say the bigger the contrast, the easier it is to weather. For example, red would be difficult to weather with rust. So as a rule of thumb big contrasts mean it's easier to see and will be easily identifiable as weathering.

Then what exactly you want to do in terms of weathering. I guess there are some easier ones like painting chipped paint via sponge. Adding color filters with oil colors is quite a bit more difficult.

Is there a particular effect you are going for? If you are just interested in the topic in general I'd say snoop around in the military scale modeling sphere. There are loads of blogs with great step by step tutorials, for all kinds of different things.

Something else worth pointing out might be 'The Weathering Magazine', which is a series of digitally published magazines by Pocketmags that each focus in-depth on one particular effect. Definitely worth a look. Though as I said, you can likely find most of the information in there if you google for military scale painting tutorials.

[Lucien Eilam]

I'd suggest picking a mid-tone with good coverage. Ultramarines blue, Salamanders green or Blood Angels red maybe. You can practise both light and dark effects on those, and it'll be a lot easier to correct mistakes than having to re-highlight yellow, for example.

[MagicMan]

I think silver is pretty easy. It covers well, so its easy to fix mistakes, and theres plenty of available tones.

[Lythronax]

I've just attempted my first bit of weathering - chipped/scratched paint using a sponge. I found it easier to see what I was doing on lighter (bone-coloured) sections, than on darker (red) areas, which did help me learn a bit more about how to use sponge weathering effectively. That said, the red was more forgiving of mistakes and far easier to correct!

[Firepower]

I had a fairly 'easy' time with my Broken Arrows, which are a sort of light/medium brown. There are different techniques to weathering, and some will work better on certain colors than others.

A technique I see more often than most is sponging, which I had a bit of an issue with. I couldn't get the sponge to leave a reasonable/sensible blotch of paint. It was always either way too much or the tiniest little specks, which made the follow-up highlight more or less impossible. I apparently just lack the magic touch, because I see a lot of folks use it and work wonders.

Another common one is rather generous sponging, and then filling in the darkened patches with silver. It works on some colors fairly well. Someone around here has Imperial Fists that look pretty good using that method. I used a vaguely similar technique on my Arrows: sponging on dark, near black paint, and then simply using silver to scuff up the edges of the armor.

There's one color I would strongly recommend you steer clear of: black. Weathering black is masterclass level nonsense

I would recommend colors that go on very easily, so blue would be my first suggestion. When weathering, you want to have an easy time cleaning up mistakes and such. Reds, yellows, white, and to a lesser extent green have relatively poor coverage, meaning it'll take more than one quick slap of paint to fix mistakes. Blue on the other hand is about as cooperative as colors get.

[Still Standing]

Depending on what you're after, I've come up with a very, very simply method of weathering that I think looks nice.  I call it the paint stripper method!

 

Paint your model a base colour.  In my case I painted it gold.  Varnish this.  Paint your "paint" colour over the top.  Take a cotton bud dipped in nail varnish remover or something similar and carefully remove the "paint" paint from the model, explosing the base colour underneath.  It looks like some sort of chemical burn (because it is).

 

http://www.coldsteelwarriors.com/40k_images/20141001/thanatar_myrmidons.jpg

[Firepower]

I would not recommend that at all (even though it works for Lloth for some reason).  Chemicals can very quickly eat through to the paint entirely, and then eat the plastic itself.  In my experience, even a slight touch of remover (and yes, acetone free) can dissolve the surface of plastic.  Perhaps it's more forgiving to the FW resins, but certainly not GW plastics.

 

I forgot to mention earlier, there are also things like weathering powders and GW's technical paints that you can try out.

[Lucien Eilam]

You can get a similar effect more safely with a couple of coats of hairspray (after gloss varnishing the model). You only need warm water to distress that.

[averykess]

For chipped paint, I'd say any mid-toned color like blue or green.  I'd avoid black and white at the beginning.  The metallics, while useful for some effects, don't always read in all light conditions/directions.

 

So, using a medium blue as an example, create the initial scratches/chips in a medium grey (or whatever color your simulated primer is).

 

Next, use a darker blue on the top half of the chip/scratch, following the contours of the grey.  You don't have to match the shape exactly, but you don't want any of the medium blue between the grey and dark blue.  Do the same with light blue on the lower part of the chip/scratch.  This technique gives the scrape a sense of depth.

 

A crude Paint.net illustration:

 

 

 

 

I used this method on the dreadnought below (with white and metallics, that is how I know it doesn't always read well).  Since there is no color lighter than white, I used the same grey on the tops and bottoms of the scrapes: