Looks good! :-) very good texture ,, and you know you can also use a texture-map on the transparency channel to get some rust to "eat" through the old metal ,, that would make this image a 9+ or perhaps even a 10 ,, great work! keep it up! :-)

This is gonna sound critical, but I'm merely trying to give you some helpfull hints, so... No offence inttended ok? So, my observations: You say you want to give the plate a peely bubble paint, showing the tear and decay. 1.) Paint itself doesn't rust. Actually rust raises above the paint level, so you'd want to use a bump map... and then make the top of the bump rusty. 2.) Paint is somewhat reflective (at least the kind of paint used on plates is). If you won't be bothered with surrounding the plate with geometry, you could apply an environmental reflection map. 3.) The grey sludge. I'm not sure what it is supposed to be, but my best guess is it would be the bare metal of the plate, where the paint has come off. The way it looks now it lies on top of the plate, especially in the upper left corner. If it IS the metal of the plate, it should be below paint level, and also it doesn't follow the contour of the plate. I can only think of 2 reasons for this. Either you didn't bother to really model the plate and gave it it's depth with a bumpmap, or the grey sludge is purely done in compositing... 4.) Licences plates are made out of allumium... and therefor they don't rust, the erode. Eroded alluminum sorta retains it's color, it just gets less reflective due to an increase in the number of bumps on the surface, thus a simple bumpmap would simulate that effect. Once again, I wasn't trying to butcher you. I'm merely urging you to look more at the real world around you before you try to simulate effects... Seventh.