South Oak Road

Hairspray weathering

Now to weather the plate girder bridge… As shown in the previous post the starting point was grey primer with a coat of Tamiya Gunship Grey aerosol spray (TS48). I was aiming for something similar to the image below.

For the first time I thought I’d give the ‘hairspray technique’ a try. It has been around in the military armour world for a few years now and allows a truly random distribution of fine rust spots than you could ever successfully paint on.

I washed over the top with slightly diluted Tamiya Light Grey acrylic (XF-66) using a No.6 shader brush. Once dry this let some of the Gunship Grey show through and gave the surface a quite nice faded ‘powdery’ finish.

Spraying the surface with a coat of cheap hairspray and working quite quickly, I used a small piece of sponge to carefully flick very small amounts of dark brown weathering powder over the top.

Once the powder and hairspray had dried I used a ‘OOO’ brush to pick out most of the spots with Burnt Umber Gouache.

Using an angled shader I washed downwards over the surface with water.

Once dry, I felt that the powder spots looked a bit too raised and decided to gently rub over the surface with some fine wet and dry paper.

Having cleaned off the surface with a large soft dry brush, I selectively spotted a bit more Burnt Umber gouache, this time with a tiny amount of black.

To finish off I used a small flat brush, in a downward motion to randomly streak the spots. I’m quite happy with the result and this technique would obviously work equally well when applied to rolling stock. The perfect excuse to order a couple of those superb Sealion YGH hopper wagons…