Quick and Dirty Water Stain Weathering

I’ve been working on my Dreadclaw pretty steadily for the last week.  It’s looking pretty good but I thought it still was a bit plain.  It needed some weathering… not your standard weathering, either.  This Dreadclaw needed to look like it’s been sitting on a wet jungle planet in a forgotten military base for 1000 years.


I’m fairly new to the whole weathering thing.  I don’t remember if I saw this technique elsewhere on the interwebs or I made a mistake with my washing and thought “that would look like pretty good water stains, I should remember that.”  Now I finally have a chance to apply the technique.

I decided to try it out early in the painting process in case it looked stupid… typically, weathering is done near the end of a build.

Below is the blank slate.  Those rivets on the fins are a very thinly rolled cylinder of GS sliced into bits with my Xacto.

This is a layer process; successive layers of wash will build to give the impression of water stains.  The first step is to make the rivets the darkest part of the weathering.  This simulates the little flora and fauna that collect in the angles of a piece of equipment in a wet environment.

I made a simple mechanical guide to help me get near-perpendicular brush strokes.  Basically, I clamped a carpenter’s square to my workbench top.  This allows me to drag the brush along the edge of the square and achieve a pretty good right angle to the horizon.

Once the rivets are dry, place a second heavy coat of wash on top of the first.  It’s best to use an old, crappy stiff bristle brush.  I have a grip of acid brushes I got from a local lab supply shop.  These things are great for dry brushing, too!

I brought the model up as close to the guide as I could and starting from the top…

…dragged my brush down quickly but evenly, leaving a trail of wash.  Go over your model in this manner a few times (layering is key!) and you end up with something like this.

Not too shabby for such a simple technique, eh?