RUST AND ABANDONED

Rust, abandoned machines and chipped paint

Corrosion has no single color. A fresh scratch tends to be a dark brownish red, an area exposed to rain turns orange and an old flaked surface fades toward ocher. These six shades follow that development from an orange brown through a medium and a light rust to a dark rust, and they are completed by a ship hull red and a chocolate tone meant for chipping.

Chipped paint is painted with the finest brush or with a torn piece of sponge: irregular patches on the edges and in the places where the crew climbs onto the machine. A lighter rust is then dotted into the larger chips, so that the scratch gains depth. It can really only be overdone through regularity, because evenly scattered dots look like a fault in the spraying.

The ship hull red serves both as a base under the whole layer of corrosion and as the color of surfaces that were left without a covering coat. For scrapyards, trailers or rail vehicles it will do on its own.

Package details: six pots of 17 ml, water-thinnable acrylic, matte finish, application by brush and by airbrush alike. A rusty surface will benefit at the end from a pigment that gives the color grain and depth.

Judge the degree of dirt by the story the model is meant to tell. A machine left standing in a yard after two winters looks different from a wreck lying in a field for twenty years, and the difference is not made by the shade but by the extent of the affected area. A surface on which not a scrap of the original finish is left loses its sense of scale and looks like a toy.