







Let's talk about Weathering, shall we? To be specific, weathering on GUNPLA and the misconception of it and how people are weathering their GUNPLA kits and a bit of a tips and pointers and dos and don'ts of weathering.

Before I write anything, I want to say this disclaimer -



I AM IN NO WAY A MASTER IN WEATHERING. I AM WRITING THIS USING MY OWN OBSERVATION, MY EDUCATIONAL BACKGROUND AND FROM MY OWN EXPERIENCES IN APPLYING WEATHERING. HOWEVER, AS YOU CAN SEE FROM MY COMPLETED WORKS, I AM SURE MY WORDS CAN AND WILL BE JUSTIFIED BY MY WORKS.



Right... let's get on with the topic at hand. Weathering.



What is weathering?



"Weathering" refers to a number of techniques that are intended to make a model appear more realistic by simulating the effects of the elements on the subject. These number of techniques are used to depict a vehicle (or in this case, a mobile suit ) at a certain time or place during the term of its service. It is a form of visualisation of a story or a certain scene in a story. For instance, a vehicle that has passed through a large puddle of muddy water or a mobile suit operating in a tropical climate where wet and dry weather changes instantly and bombarded with dusts and rain.



So what are (some) people doing with their gunpla when it comes to weathering? Well, in a nut-shell, everything i.e. they see something about weathering or read about it and they just applied what they read about and just put applied the whole lot of it. For instance, a gunpla bombarded with dry brushing all over it ( which makes me think of mobile suits bear-hugging each other) or a gunpla with casting textures put all over it ( I graduated with Material Science and for 3 years, I have never heard of easy-to-fabricate parts such as slab or panels being casted )



Fair enough, everybody starts somewhere. I did too but I studied for 3 years (2008 to 2011) before I actually applied any kind of weathering. I will give you an example -



This is my very first kit that I weathered in 2009 ( with that same mind set that I just described)



As you have figured out by now, I just learned about chipping and just applying it everywhere regardless of whether these chips are in logical locations or not.



Compare that with my 2014 builds -

(Click on the picture and you will be linked to the original postings )









That is how long it took me to get to this level. And I'm still a novice.