First try at weathering my card buildings

I'm fairly happy with the completed my card stock buildings for my WW2 city board except for one thing, they look too clean. So I dug around a few model railway sites and picked up a few tips on weathering. I was a bit nervous at first as I didn't want to ruin the buildings but then I thought what the heck just give it a go.

Before weathering

 

I tried out a few techniques on some scrap card and I was fairly happy with the results so I moved on to weathering the roof of the sand house. I decided to do the run off stain from vent stack first. I was using a brown wash with a dry brushing technique so very little of the wash actually was applied but I could build it up as needed. The results are shown below.

 

I felt that the stain was too dark so I used a wider brush on the other side of the roof to get a more diffuse stain. I much preferred how that turned out. The result is shown below.

I also did a random dry brush of vertical strokes over the rest of the roof to give the whole thing a more weathered look. The aerial view below shows the finished result.

At this point I'd accepted that I was going to make some mistakes and just went for it. Although the dark stain lines were too prominent they didn't look so bad from a distance on the table. So I used my light dry brushing of the wash to simulate stains from window sills, the general darker stains that you find at the base of the walls and doors on older buildings and a general dry brush of the walls to break up the clean look.

 

The stains at the bottom of the doors

The walls after being toned down.

 

Being fairly pleased with the sand house I moved on to the water tower. The first thing I did was make a rust coloured wash to use on the water tank. Pictures I'd seen showed lots of vertical rust streaks so that's what I tried to emulate. The results are shown below.

 

The stains aren't so obvious in normal light and I'm happy with how they look on the table. I also used the dark brown wash to tone down the walls and add stains under the windows. I wasn't so happy with that turned out but its ok.

Although they're not perfect I'm happier with the weathered versions than the originals as they look more 'real'. What's more I feel much more confident about weathering the rest of the buildings when they arrive. As with most things the more you do the better you'll get, hopefully!