Battle-worn painting tutorial (Barricades)

I've been asked a few times how I paint the battle damage and rust effects on my Barricades. Because I had a second core set I had to paint up more barricades and made a tutorial out of it. The techniques are really simple and anyone can pull this off if you know the trick.
Below I will take you through each step.

I used an airbrush to prime the model, give it some pre-shading and then put a thin base layer over it. If you don't have an airbrush just paint the whole model grey. The reason I use an airbrush on larger flat surfaces like that is that I can pre-shade and that gives more depth to the model. The effect is very subtle so you don't have to do this step.

You can see the barricade on the left after I have painted the base layer over it. Here you can see the result of the pre-shading. a subtle effect. The barricade on the right is where we apply the next step. I dry-brushed the whole model with an ivory color paint. This adds an edge highlight to the piece.

To create more depth and contrast to the barricades I got out my number two favourite paint or actually wash (agrax eartshade is my number 1 if you were wondering). Get a small brush and let the wash run araound all the edges of the model. Make sure not use too much wash because it will pool. You can make a few oil leak streaks on the model coming from the grill bits using the wash. 

To add battle damage or worn look to the barricades you get a dark brown color, I used Black Brown and you get a piece of fine sponge. Get some paint on the sponge and dab it on a piece of kitchen towel first then dap it on a few place on the barricade. As you can see in the picture above you can achieve this look in just a couple of seconds. If you want to do this with a brush it would take you much longer and would be a lot harder to achieve. If you want to add extra detail you should get a small brush and some light grey/white paint and paint a few lines right underneath some of the pathes. This gives the impression of the paint chipping off. I didn't do this on my barricades however.

So far so good and most painters use the sponge trick so nothing new there but very few painters use oil paints as we always use acrylic paints but for the next step you should get some oil paints. Get a color that looks like rust (or maybe two) and put a few tiny dots on the model that you want to be the top of your rust streak. You can see it in the picture above but you'll have to look hard.

Because oil paints dry really slow you don't have to rush. You should also get some odourless white spirit that you can get in any hobby/craft store. Wet a large flat brush with some white spirit and and run it from top to bottom over the small dots of oil paint in the direction that you want your streak. You will instantly see the streaking effect. Because the oil paint doesn't dry quickly you can really work it. Pushing it around and if you make a mistake you can just whipe it off and start over. It's really easy and gives a great result. If you have done this on one of you models you will probably want to experiment with other colors to make other effects. (white oil paint for water streaks and black for oil stains for example). Even if you don't like the results the next day you can take a swab with some white spirit and remove it with a few rubs. Oil paints will just be another tool in your toolbox.

As a final step I have taken some metal color paint to add to the areas that we used the sponge technique on. It will make it look like fresh scratches. You can see it in the picture above but you'll have to look closely, I didn't want to over do this effect.

Now your battle worn barricades are ready. The barricades have a computer panel and some flashy lights on the back that you can paint but I'll leave that to you. On the left a bit of inspiration from my barricades.