Here's the first playing piece I've painted for the sixth edition of Car Wars--a wrecked car flipped over on its backside.
I painted the main body in thin coats of yellow with red and metallic accents, then used weathering pencils to add sand and smoke stains.
I also smeared on some Armageddon Dust to serve as dried mud.
This model will serve the purpose, but truth be told, I'm not terribly happy with it. It looks messy and ill-formed to my eye, but I'm not sure what I would have done differently.
That's a model with a lot of dent details, plus armour bits and whatnot. There's a lot happening. In Car Wars, every vehicle has three stories. The first is how it would have looked fresh from the factory line, in a calm, measured, civilian world. The next is how all of its fighting bits are retrofitted after the fact. The final is how the vehicle fares after its biggest fight.
ReplyDeleteSince Car Wars borrows so much from Mad Max and Death Race 2000, that's where you have to look. Choose palettes from 1980's cars, especially from Australia. Back then, they didn't have the pigments we have now, so you want to choose "nostalgic" colours. Unless it's a hero car, if it's too vibrant it might look out of place, like a Tattooine Vespa cycle.
Armour, I don't know if a Car Warrior would bother to paint it, and if it did get painted, the paint would come off. You so are looking at metal and rust. Maybe the paint would stay on in the large areas, but rust would creep in on every edge. Mad Max teaches us that if there is time to put in a beauty object, you do that. Some cars in Mad Max are just utilitarian, but others will have some surprising glamour, like maybe a chandelier, or a doll's head, or damask applique. A flag, a skull, a roulette wheel, something found and tacked on but with love and attention to detail.
Finally, the battle tells a story. The car is moving forward, so weathering from sandstorms and bombs would travel in long, sweeping longitudinal lines that run from front to back. It would almost be like pinstriping. When the car rolls, there would be lines of damage that curve and cross diagonally over the body. This car is fairly wrecked, so that would be hard to achieve, maybe you's want to attempt something like that on a more pristine model. But you want to think forensically. If you saw this car driving on the highways, you'd look at its scars and think, it rolled over on its roof to the right, because you can see the skid marks that would have peeled off paint and armour.
Awesome guidance, Jeff! Thank you so much. I'll keep these considerations top of mind when I paint the next wreck.
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