Besides putting your stuff out the backyard for six or eight months?
Couple-o-things.
For buildings, after you have completed your structure, get a can of Floquil engine black or grimey black, and from at least three feet mist short spurts of paint in the direction of the building, watching how far the paint travels. Once you get a feel for how the paint is coming out, you can get your distance right and lightly mist the building. Makes a big difference.
warning Use good paint and avoid "Testors", particularly Flat Black. I have had to do a lot of touch up on building where I tried to use "Flat Black" because the paint sputters out of the can too much. Not sure it is a chemical issue regarding the "Flat Black" but avoid it.
I have also taken to using a mist of Floquil "instant Weather" on top of that - which is a creamy color - a very light mist adds tone and breaks up the just painted look.
This building has a light mist of "instant weather"
On wooden structures, I use a bottle of Ethyl (not isopropyl) achohol with a couple of teaspoons of black india ink added to it. Shake it up and it's pretty black. Likewise I have a separate bottle tinted with brown ink. Burch it on to a wooden structure pretty liberally and let it set. The alcohol evaporates leaving a nice grimey, but not too dark, dirty surface. You can also do this on plastic and plaster, I just mentioned wood because the wood absorbs the color nicely.
This dock is was light grey and I kept painting it over with an alochol wash to get this direty look:
For rusty looking finishes, I mist the item with Floquil Tuscan, then overmisted with reefer grey, black and black. This photo I laid several light coats of Olive Drab spray on this old car. I then followed it with a light misting of tuscan and then a misting of engine black.
The roof of teh small loading dock in teh lower right corner started out as shiney silver, ended up rusty:
For ballast, or rock walls, I will heavily dilute some acrylic paint in water. I have been using the Woodland Scneice sltae grey and various umbers with good results.
This building is dirtied up with pastel chalk and teh wood and plastic are done with india ink and alcohol:
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