• What I've learned: Be sure to use a stiff bristled brush when dry brushing. Dry brushing kind of demonstrates the philosophy of "less is more". Add a little paint to the tip of your brush. Then dab most of the paint off of the brush onto a paper towel. Apply very thin amounts of paint over the raised parts of your surface. This allows the coats underneath to show in the little grooves, corners and crevasses of the object. It's the simplest thing in the world just by being very conservative with the amount of paint on the brush. As you probably figured out, dry brushing causes the paint to dry much more quickly.



• Specific technique for this project: This particular dry brushing should be allowed to look streaked, which is the easiest thing to do with acrylic paint. The idea of dry brushing with the above tutorial isn't about adding a solid coat... It's all about creating the illusion of a decaying rusty metal texture by allowing the colors underneath to stay somewhat visible. The only totally solid coat in the above project was the first coat. Because rust generally doesn't form in straight lines, I used slightly more paint on my brush than most dry brush tuts may recommend. It allowed spots of brown get into some of the nooks. This is a good project for beginners because it looks best if it's sort of messy. It's ok to color out of the lines! You kind of need to when making things look like rust.

Used This Tut:

1 - The file+layout was growing way too large and the way I had arranged my layers would not make for an easy conversion to Flash. I'm very happy with how it looks... but it wouldn't work with this format.
2 - It was getting so looong! I just talk and talk and talk and there isn't ONE screenshot of Photoshop's interface during the progress.