I’ve had family staying over for a little while, so things have been a little busy for much on the hobby front. My youngest nephew is 10, so to entertain both him and my son (and lets be honest – myself), I broke out the good old X-Wing Miniatures game. While we were playing that on the kitchen table my sis-in-law, niece and wife were all colouring in. My sister in law is big into colouring in, and had inspired my wife to start it up again. So what I am I telling you all this for, well, it reminded me of a forum post that I had been meaning to have a go at doing for quite a while (as you’ll see from the forum dates) – using colouring pencils to weather the Falcon.

Using pencils for weathering models is not a new idea, its been around for years. In fact I think you can even buy “weathering pencils”. The railway modelling and scale modelling communities have been using this technique for ages, but I haven’t seen it much used in tabletop gaming.

It really is a simple process and pretty quick too. I pretty much completed the Falcon in an evening, after a little experimenting to build confidence. Here is an example of how I went about weathering the model. Note that this example was put together after the Falcon was completed, and was done on my **cough** second YT-1300.

Colouring Pencils

This example uses four colours, trying to replicate rust and water staining, but I had actually used a number of other shades on my Falcon, including green, grey, and reds. All pencils need to be as sharp as you can get them.

Here are the four pencil colours, a rusty orange, a light brown, a dark brown and a black.

I first applied the dark brown, I tried to place it on the models in locations that would make sense in how water would collect and run over the surface. I admit I found this process easy on the most surfaces except for the flat surfaces which caused me a headache.

Next up the light brown was used to extend the original dark brown lines.

A small amount of orange was used to add a brighter rust colouring to the streaks.

The last colour, black, was added to the model. It was used to mostly to darken the upper and lower most edges of the individual panels, as well as add shade to the lower edges of any raised edges.

The last step that brings it all together is to smudge it with your finger. I tried to keep the smudges running in the same direction as the streaks.

If it all goes wrong clean it off with a dampened piece of kitchen roll. That’s a benefit of this method, but it also means that I need to give the model a coat of matt varnish before gaming with it to stop rubbing off the weathering.

Completed Falcon

Below are a couple of pictures of the weathered YT-1300 compared to the untouched 2nd YT-1300 (before doing the above example).