Weathering an Aluminum finish with...PENCIL???

After making painting the base coat of silver, olive drab, yellow wingtips, and insignia and markings and touching it up to look perfect, let’s mess it up! Here are some shots before the weathering begins:

Looks straight off the factory floor, .... B-O-R-I-N-G!

First I distress the markings by rubbing them with FINE steel wool. This really does a lot of work for you IF the detail is there under the paint. Rivets pop through, panel lines show wear and the color dulls down a bit. It also takes the ridges off the paint from the masking tape borders. In short, makes it look REAL. For very little "elbow grease".

Close up of the lettering on the wing. Rivets clearly show through the flat black paint and if a bit of the black wears down and the aluminum shows through? Well, that happened on the full scale as well as they aged.

For aluminum paint, I’ve found one of the easiest and most effective ways to weather it is to use plain old graphite, more commonly known as PENCIL. “What?! Use pencil to paint on an aircraft? It will come off, it won’t last... oh the humanity!” Relax. The positives of using pencil are that it is extremely easy to use, and fool-proof! If you mess-up, just ERASE it! What about durability? The 7 year old P-47 and 4 year old P-51 have pencil weathering and it is still there. No protective coating at all. If you rub on it, the graphite will come off, sometimes on your fingers, but it won’t come completely clean off from the aircraft. Even if it does, it is no big deal to reapply it. The graphite seems to go into the fine grain of the paint. I didn’t believe it myself until I used it, but pencilI IS surprisingly durable!

My 7 year old P-47, pencil weathering still intact and NO CLEAR COAT!

[Technique] First SHADE the area to be weathered (in and around panel lines, stitching, etc) don’t press down hard, but lightly shade the pencil on. Then with your finger rub it into the paint, smoothly blending it out. I always try to emphasize shadows by shading where there would be shadows from the details. UNDER a panel line, Under the rib stitching, under a hatch line. Never on TOP. (As a general rule: Shade from top to bottom and front to back.)

Why do this shading?? What we are doing is trying to make the small size aircraft look bigger, by creating shadows and slight graduations where they appear on the full scale aircraft but aren’t on the model because the model isn’t physically big enough to cast as DENSE a shadow. Hope that makes sense because it hurt my brain to write it.

Does it work? The rudder, Before and After.

I use a mechanical pencil for tighter areas of detail like hatches. Oh, and just any old pencil will get the job done. I picked up the carpenter's pencil just because that was what I had handy, but it does work well on broad areas.

On the leading edge of the horizontal stab, you can see that I got some graphite in front of the line. Remember to shade the bottom of a line or behind the leading edge. All weathering on a model should be UNDER or BEHIND the line. Rarely in front of or on top of. Since this is pencil, I will just ERASE it. A kneaded eraser (can be picked up at art stores). Most erasers will work pretty well, but once in a while they "skid" and make a blacker mark than was there in the first place. The kneaded eraser does a "softer" job.