Tutorial – Battle Damage

I started to practice battle damage on one of my tanks during some personal hobby time the other evening and someone asked if I would be able to tell them how I did it. Here is my step by step guide to creating battle damage on vehicles:

Step 1: Basecoat and edgehighlight the tank. Don’t worry about being super duper neat with the edge highlights, those parts that are a bit thicker or smudgy you can create chips with later. I am going to focus on the one panel for the purpose of this tutorial.

Step 2 – Take a piece of sponge and dip it into the highlihgt colour. Wipe most of the paint off, as though you were drybrushing, and spot it over the panel which is to be damaged.

Step 3: Using the edge highlight colour, paint in sharp, jagged shapes within the panel. Jagged is important. Don’t use soft lines!

Step 4 – Paint inside the jagged shapes with Dark Brown – I have used Doombull in this case. Do not paint over the edge of the highlight colour, you want a small edge between the base colour and the brown.

Step 5 – Paint inside the brown with a darker brown – here I have used Dryad Bark.

Step 6 – Paint another layer of darker brown inside what you have done already. I have used Dryad bark mixed with Black 50/50.

Step 7 – Use Seraphim Sepia to paint lines of rust from the lowest point of the damaged space. This creates the effect of running gunk from the battle damage.

Step 7 – This effect can be used over decals as well.

I hope that helps! I would love to see people’s attempts at battle damage if they decide to try it out.