Brass, clean and dirty??

[Esmedune]

Hello my beauties,

I am wondering on how I am going to approach creating brass where needed, so I am hopeful for some suggestions. I will need some brilliantly clean, and also some tarnished and grubby pipework. I was considering electro plating the real thing, but that is just overkill. What do people do? 

[The Johnster]

Brass is best modelled in brass, as is copper.    It can be polished, weathered, left to tarnish naturally, or painted over (flat matt primer needed as undercoat)-; I was about to say ‘just like the real thing’, but of course it is   the real thing!  For polished brass, use brass and polish it, for tarnished, leave the piece put in the garden for a week, and for heat ‘blueing’, use a gas lighter; hold the workpiece in pliers in this case, and letot cool before handling it.  If you overdo the tarnishing or blueing, or want to remove paint, simply polish the piece…

[brossard]

To give brass a weathered look, you can use a chemical blackener such as gun blue or Carrs Chemical black.  IIRC, the active ingredient is Selenium Dioxide (poisonous).

 

https://www.phoenix-paints.co.uk/products/solvents-cat2

 

John

[dpgibbons]

AK Interactive offers a range of waxy metallic paints called True Metal that includes both shiny and tarnished brass. I've used them on whitemetal parts and the results are almost indistinguishable from the real thing.