sludge wash

A while back, Paul Boyer , from FSM, wrote an excellent article on easy weathering. You can find it on this site's index and read it online. I have used this technique (acrylic paint, water and dishwashing soap-"Sludge Wash" several times and found it produces good results. The real key is having a well cured gloss coat finish otherwise it is difficult to remove excess wash. Also the wash drys pretty quickly so you want to remove it before it really sets on areas adjacent to the panel lines. You can always go back and add more wash if you remove too much from the lines. Practice using a beater model to check your sludge wash mixture.

This is the direct link to Swanny's weathering (sludge wash) how-to. I found it works very well.

http://www.swannysmodels.com/Weathering.html

seeBee

Thanks for the advise, sorry for getting back to you so late, Ive been out of town.

I'm not the expert, but what I do is as follows. (Not only on plane exterior, but also bike engines, etc.)

Firstly, gloss coat of a non-acrylic nature. (I like TS13, but there are many different options). You then make a very thin acrylic wash with black/brown/gray (depend on background colour, effect you want, etc) acrylics, thinned ad nausiem. Either with your paint manufacturer's thinner, soapish water or window cleaner. From there on - simple. You take that "sludge" and simply paint it into recesses, corners, etc. It will look outright terrible at this stage, but you then clean it afterwards with an acrylic thinner (on either a cloth or earbud), which won't touch you non-acrylic gloss coat.

Please test before doing! Don't (like me) screw up a finished model the first time you try it! I took the wrong thinner-bottle by accident and completely messed up! Fortunately, nothing that can't be redone, most of the time!

Hope it helps. Good luck!

thanks guys.

jridge--That is where I found sludge wash but unless I wasnt looking in the right spot, I couldnt find much about it.

Also take a look at Swanny's web site - http://swannysmodels.com/

try the testors website at testors.com and download their modelling manual, it downloads in a pdf format so make sure you have acrobat reader. It'll explain everything you need to know about sludge and how to make, it with photos aswell, plus other tips excellent reading