Adding Depth and Variation to Plastic Model Kits

Transcript*

Intro

Sits. Damn.

Hello all. This is David from Loisirs vers le soleil and in today’s video I am going to show you the weathering technique known as marbling. As you can see, I’ve lost my marbles because instead of showing you that, I’m playing with marbles. But I can fix that.

All right, let’s get this childish nonsense out of here. We’re men. We paint miniatures.

What is Marbling?

Marbling is a weathering technique we use to give our paint jobs a more dirty and de-saturated look. This is also known as pre-shading where essentially we’re taking our model plane or tank priming it in black. Then after that, we want to take a light color, preferably a white or a light grey, and with an airbrush, paint very thin squiggly lines, uh, in a random pattern.

You don’t want to be uniform. Then after that, you want to put your usual paint color on top of that, but it’s got to be very thinned out. So, I’m going to show you a demonstration right here.

Set Up

For my test subject, I’ve got a all black SR71. I’ve got my aérographe ready. Uh, for this technique, you’re going to want a needle size no larger than.3. 2 is perfect, but uh, in here, I’ve got a.3, which is just fine. For my marbling paint, I’m going to be using uh Ammo’s Atom satin white. I did used to use Vallejo Modèle Air for this.

However, because their paint is pretty thinned, uh it dries extremely quickly and because of that, it has a annoying tendency to constantly uh block the nozzle of your airbrush so that you have to wipe the tip off every like 5 minutes. So, I decided to switch over. I will be thinning it with their corresponding thinner.

Base Application

So, I’ll uh I’ll cut ahead and then we’ll get uh started. All right, got the paint ready to go. So, now let’s turn this thing on. That’s seven. And if I can quickly show this here, you also want your PSI to be no higher than 15 or one bar. uh you don’t want a lot of air coming out here. Now, what you’re going to want to do is fill in the spaces between the panel lines. So, don’t actually touch the lines themselves.

And you want, like I said, random squiggly lines. Now, why you don’t want to fill in the lines is because that is where dirt, grime, and oil usually seep out of a plane. So, that you’re going to want to keep dark. And simply just, like I said, fill in between the panel lines.

Top Layer Application

Now, for my top layer of paint, I’ll be using blue grey, which I’ve already got thinned and ready to go. And before I start, I decided off camera to just completely spray over everything in this section here, just to show you the difference once I put the top layer of paint on. Now, you’re going to want to do this in light coats. Don’t pack it on.

Final Results

So, here’s our final result. As you can see, there is a clear difference thanks to our marbling technique here. The surface looks very uneven and dirty. It’s beautiful. Whereas up here where we just sprayed white all over, it looks a lot more bland and uninteresting. And you you’ll notice down here, this was just black. Nothing sprayed over it.

The gray on here looks slightly darker than here and here. So that shows the importance of what color primer you have underneath your airbrush paint as black will make any paint on top of it look darker, especially yellows and reds. So that is marbling.

David’s Conclusion

In conclusion, marbling is an effective and easy, though somewhat tedious tactic to take your models from a factory fresh finish to machines of war that have seen some things. It’s what separates models like this
from models like this. See, not only does it make them look better, it makes them bigger, too. So, I hope this video helped you out.

I hope you learned some things. And feel free to purchase any of the products I used here at Sunward Hobbies in store or online.

Thank you very much for watching the video. Remember to like, comment, subscribe, follow us on our socials, and until the next one, adios.

About the Author:

David Peckam has built scale models since he was 12, specializing largely on military aircraft. He is a makeup artist and background actor for films and TV. He enjoys watching hockey and of course, movies. He has an excellent knowledge of hobby products and if you have questions concerning scale model airplanes.

*Video by David Peckham
Video Edited by Daniela Castellano
Transcript generated by youtube
Edited by Angelo Castellano