Weathering Effects

[Gaz]

I'm about 85% into a foam build of an Iron Man Mk7 build. The build itself is going really well (can't add photos right now as I'm out and about) and I'm currently using car paint followed by clear car lacquer to finish. The results are really shiny and I'm happy with the colour, however my friend and critic suggests that the suit currently looks a little flat, plasticky, too perfect if that's at all possible.

We were talking it through and he suggested I look into some sort of weathering or texturing effects, and he was talking about how in miniature modelling, there are washes that you can cover an item in, and they leave behind shadow effects etc.

This is my first build, and I have pretty much zero experience with painting. Without going to the extremes of adding battle damage effects, are there any known ways to add texture or detailing to a suit, particularly an iron man armour?

Thanks for any help in advance!

 

[Biskt]

What he is talking about is washing and drybrushing. paint watered down black ink/acrylic into the recesses, areas where carbon burning might have occurred -be ready with plenty of tissues to wipe some away if you mess up. The next step (once the previous has dried) is drybrushing and 'chipping' affect. Dry brushing is where you get paint on your brush, and then wipe most of it off, then lightly brushing it on the surface, so that the colour builds up slowly. Start by drybrushing all the edges likely to have been scraped and scratched during flight/movement with black paint. Then with a smallish brush apply little slivers of metallic paint keeping within the drybrushed black areas.

Heres how my suit turned out using this method: