Realistic paint chips -- how?

[Mangas]

Hello to all.
I need some advice on making proper paint chips, please. I don't know what am I doing wrong, but they're not "true"... Nothing but a lousy efforts...



Any suggestions?

[inkworm]

Until I found out that it was paint not bare metal under my A6M2 I created a nice gradiated metal finish to cover the whole aircraft, applied a layer mask, then selected one of the blotchy photoshop brushes and just unmasked the bits I wanted, making sure it had nice hard edges with a wet brush setting. Then BH showed me the error of my ways and I sorted the colour out!

Just look at some old industrial photos of chipped paint and use that as a basis. Maybe if you increased the size of the chips so it shows up a bit more, that might make a difference.

[BLOWHARD]

I created a nice gradiated metal finish to cover the whole aircraft

I do that too, just not on Zeros. That's a REALLY good way to do that part of the job.
Masks too, just like Ink says. That's the bast way. Then you can fix, change, add and reuse on other versions of that plane too and vary the effects.
I use a combination of the kind of brushes Ink uses plus I have several layer textures that I use to make combined odd shaped chippy selections.
The real trick is matching photos of a specific plane, you just have to noodle that out by hand.
Just make sure you have variation is shapes and sizes.
Your chips are looking good for a start, but then add size like Ink says, and it will be even better.

Then BH showed me the error of my ways

Sorry Ink, the Zero is just plain weird and a good exception in a lot of ways and I might be wrong too...it just comes down to which theory sounds more likely after looking at photos