Gettin rustyyy

My friends, the rust effects over chips are done, and I think they're starting to tone down the heavy posh-shading. It's not a heavy oil dot filter that covers up the entire surface, thus toning the effects down, but it's more stuff happening on the model that drags the attention away from the shading. Heck, at least that's my perception - we can often become "blind" by looking at the model every day 😁

There were a couple constructive comments under the last post regarding the mottled effect. I'll get to y'all tomorrow morning, but I'd like to address this so everyone can see my thoughts - I completely agree, and it's part of this experiment. We'll see how the earth effects will deal with this kind of surface, but I definitely won't go overboard with them just to tone it down. Will do my usual approach to really see where's the "limit" with the technique. So far I'm feeling like the shading should be more subtle around weld beads, as these appear really dark, but we'll see how the shiny chipping and, again, earth washes, tone some of them down. Weirdly, I like the strong, contrasting look around panel lines, it's the type of effect I'd normally chase with washes and fake oil paint shadows (remember "ambient occlusion"? 😁) Highlights, on the other hand, feel mostly alright so far, although they could've been more subdued on some of the individual details such as the rectangular panels on the engine deck. It's similar to what modelers do with color modulation and picking out individual panels using different tones, and it works... but it's not really my thing, so yeah, these could be more subtle as the effect stands out a bit too much on a large model such as this. It would work perfectly in 1/72nd scale though IMO. 

So yeah, these are my thoughts so far and all this frog needs are some shiny exposed welds and painted details to make it ready for dust and mud! :)