Masking Tape Weathering

With so many techniques for weathering your models, you might find yourself asking, which one is right for this project? I have asked myself this question far to many times.

The answer, experiment!

That’s right. You will truly never know until you try them first. Be familiar with the material you are working with and then you will find what works and what does not work.

This project came about after looking (and envying) the work of Chuck Doan. He had mentioned in one of his photo captions that he used masking tape to pull up paint that was not quite dry giving a very realistic “peeling paint” effect. Which leads me to this article.

This will be my first attempt trying this, so I am sure I will better the technique as I practice more.

Scrap Box

As stated before, it is important to practice any and all new techniques. Most modelers have a scrap box and many have several. This is a junk drawer or drawers if you will, filled with scrap lumber or plastic from previous projects. Cheep testing material. You save money and trips to the hobby shop.

So it begins

I will set aside some pieces of scrap basswood material. This will give me a chance to fine-tune my technique.

For tape, I am using an ordinary lint brush. I like this because it has manageable squares of masking tape, which is very sticky. This is important in order to pull up the paint.

I begin by painting the stripwood with a brush. Allow the paint to dry but not completely, just dry to the touch. 

I will be using two colors to test the results. One will be a lighter color and one will be darker as pictured above.

Once the paint is dry, you can "peel" your paint a couple of ways. You can either place it flat on your workbench or fold your tape (sticky side up) and place it onto the model. As we go along, I will be using both methods for different results and projects.

I want to see what the results will be with both colors and see if I can vary the amount of weathering. With the tape flat on my workbench, with it's sticky side up, I  began to lightly press the stripwood into the tape. As you can see from the tape the paint easily pulls right off. The more you press the material onto the tape, the more paint will be removed. This is great news! And as you can see in the photo below, I can vary the weathering effects. I only placed the lighter paint onto the tape for just about five or six times on just a flat surface where the darker one I used both a flat surface as well as a folded piece of tap in my hand and focused on one or two spots.

To me the results are outstanding and now to really get down to weathering.

Aging Wood

The previous test was plain stripwood. I did not sand or weather it in any way. But now I want to see what I can really do with the effects I just learned. 

For this process, I will age my wood with ink and watercolor as described in my forum post here. I also added some Grantline nut-bolt-washer castings, which are painted with Poly Scale Roof Brown,  to see what the effect will be on plastic. I  aged the wood first because when you peel the paint, the grey weathered wood will show through adding to the realism.

I added a coat of paint. In this case, I used Poly Scale Undercoat Light Grey. Once the paint was tacky, I began to use the tape (held in my hand) to remove the paint. 

Wanting to add a little more contrast between the wood and paint as well as the ridges in the wood, I gave the entire piece a light wash of India Ink and water. This really exposed the raw wood and blended the colors nicely.

I then let it dry then gave my work one more coat of paint. This greatly increased the contrast and added more texture to the wood. As before, a light wash of India Ink blended the colors and as you can see below, the results are pretty realistic.

Final Thoughts

I discovered that with the heavily textured wood the paint is much harder to remove than the smoother wood. I do like the results. There is a lot of potential with this technique and I would like to see it used on a complete building or other materials such as plastic or brass.