One of the best ways to make your airplanes come alive is to weather them. It may seem strange, distressing a shiny new aircraft, but injecting a little character also injects new life. Here's a quick guide to making your planes look more realistic through weathering.
Let's start by focusing on one particular model. This is a Durafly P-40N I picked up a while ago. Out of the box, it had a nice looking olive green paint scheme, but it looked a little too perfect.
Here's what you'll need at the most basic level: it's as simple as having a fine brush and a small pot of metallic paint. You don't need a fancy airbrush. Although this would be helpful for more advanced level weathering, you can get some fantastic results with just a few carefully placed blobs of paint. Without breaking the bank, you could also get yourself a couple of larger brushes and some black, grey and brown colours that may come in useful for adding exhaust smoke and that sort of thing.
Before beginning to slap paint on your model, you may want to check out some photos of real aircraft for reference. To get that realistic appearance, it's useful see what you're trying to capture on a smaller scale. Browsing sites like Pinterest may be a good place to start for some inspiration.
Starting with the wings, some metallic paint was dabbed along the panel lines to simulate paint chipping. This gives the model a little more depth whilst accentuating this moulded detail. The paint gives the impression that the panels have been removed and reattached at some point during this P-40's life.
This effect can also be applied to a physically damaged area of the airplane in order to mask it or actually make it a characterful feature of the model. This plane crashed on its first flight due to being tail heavy. Thankfully there was only minor damage to the wing and tail which could be disguised.
This damaged wing of a foam board BF-109, also received this treatment. A drawn line with black permanent marker combined with some silver paint gives the impression of a flap, even though it doesn't exist!
Black paint can be dry brushed onto areas to create gun smoke or engine exhaust soot. It always looks cool to make your warbird's guns appear to have been fired in combat. The key here is to build up faint layers of paint until you have a smooth finish. You can also use this technique to simulate dirt and grime that has been streaked across a wing or other surface. Sometimes, you'll see on real aircraft that certain raised panels have streaks behind where water or oil has accumulated and stained.
The wheels on this model were weathered using a 'wash' technique. This is where the paint is thinned down, applied liberally to the surface (so it goes into all of the recesses) and then mostly wiped off with absorbent tissue. This gives the effect that dirt has gone into the crevices of the rim whilst highlighting and contrasting with the raised areas.
And that's about it! A very limited amount of work can seriously take your scale model to the next level. You can try this on all sorts of types of RC plane, including our Flite Test DIY foam board aircraft.
Make sure to show us your weathered warbirds by posting pictures of them in the Facebook Flite Test Fans Group - it's a great place to share your work and get feedback.
Article by James Whomsley
Editor of FliteTest.com
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