Salted Mechanicus

I began a salting project for my Mechanicus Scenery a while ago and have progressed significantly with it offline. Today is therefore an update on this (rather large) project. 

I commenced the project by applying salt to random parts of my terrain in clumps and lumps all over the place. This was done by simply using water and salt (the water acting as a weak glue) over the base coat. The base coat here is black. However, I have used some silver spray paint to go over the black to provide a bit of a random look to the base coat in many places. This approach was deliberate in order to get a varied look from the salting technique at the end of the day.

The next step that I undertook was to grab my air gun and spray paint the Mechanicus terrain with green paint, followed by various highlights in grubby orange colours. The first image shows the result of this step.

The globs of salt can clearly be seen still stuck to the terrain at this point (check out the left hand panel of the railing in the image above in particular - but also the other two panels of the same railing and a few other bits that can also be seen in the image. 

To proceed, I took a strong toothbrush (and at one point, a needle) and started to chip away the salt that I'd scattered over the terrain. The purpose of this is to get rid of some of the sprayed on green and orange paint to reveal the black and silver base coat beneath. The next image shows what the terrain looks like after removing the salt.

With the salt off, the specks of black and silver start to show through. Its like the green paint (or decay?) has been chipped away to reveal some fresher metal beneath. Of course, we could have inverted this process by having something brown and rusted looked at the base coat layer -- chipping away the paint in this manner would reveal the brown rust layer beneath. That's also perfectly valid. Here I have simply chosen to do it this way to reveal the original metal beneath -- it still looks solid, but the terrain looks like it has been weathered, worn, and not seen too much attention recently, which was the look I was after.

Already at this stage, the chips showing through look realistic. However, I wanted to further enhance the look of the chips. I did this by carefully applying an edge of lighter green and in some places black to the outskirts of the chipped paint. The result of this is below.

Overall this communicates a terrain piece that has been neglected for a long while and could do with a new lick of paint. As if that is going to happen in the underparts of some patulous hive city. 

There is still plenty of work to do on this terrain though. I want to pick out some of the cables (I started with a red on that connects the underside of the middle and right panel of the rail here) and get to work on splotching some muted yellows around the place to give it a muckier and more industrial look. So although the main work of the salting is now complete, there is plenty left to do with this project yet.