Five sessions with oil paints
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You knew that Bob was going to show up when we got to oil paints, right?
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At this point counting the sessions felt a bit stupid, as this stuff took a silly amount of time. But it would've also been quite silly to split each of these exploratory "play around and find out" things into a post of their own. So here we had a collection of things in one long post, concentrating on me trying out a new medium: the oil paints. Those took two sessions of their on in a way, as on one evening I painted and a day or two later I was cleaning up what went over the target area.
After my first panic and worrying this was lots of fun, let that be said in the beginning of the post.
20: Hidden test in the bottom
Only a mad person would try out something new and untested in the parade spot, I chose to apply my first self-made wash (in this case it was supposed to be a pin wash) to the bottom of the tank. First I dropped a nugget of dark brown paint (ABT080 Brown Wash) into one of the minibowls of my new palette, and then mixed in some thinner (ABT111 Odourless Thinner). I diluted the paint very thin indeed, and applied it into the leaf suspension bits facing in, then onto the different panel gaps, bolt-ends, screw sinkings, and who knew what all resided under the Panzerwanne, as long as it remained hidden from sight.
The capillary effect worked effectively in the gaps, in some places I purposefully overapplied the wash outside my target areas. After being done with this part I started, surprisingly eagerly, mixing some rusty goo (ABT060 Light Rust).
This mixture was made a bit less runny than the previous wash, and I applied it all around the tracks in pseudorandom concentrations. Later I'd add some darker rust as a new layer.
the next morning
Without any kind of a reliable clue of how long I should let the oils dry before attempting to clean anything up - or how long I could let them dry before they were fixable - I waited overnight and used a moment to try out thinner-cleaning at early afternoon on Saturday. The overflows disappeared/blended in like nothing, just like advertised. The first photo here was taken when the thinner was still wet on the surfaces, the result looked much neater after some more waiting.
At this point I remembered that I had not applied rust to the track armour in the back, so I did that now. Some odd portions of light rust were applied here and there.
After drying for some good time the rustiness looked pretty nice, despite the lighting conditions.
Also, being all dry the bottom of the vehicle looked good. It was a shame that it wasn't even supposed to be visible for viewers. But as a practicing surface it ended up great.
This first test run convinced me. Now I just needed to learn how to use these paints.
While I was waiting for my oils to dry I used the remaining time to paint up the rubbery pieces. I painted all of the road wheels and return rollers, and also the base of the antenna mount on the rear of the casemate. Naturally I used the rubber paint (VMA 71315 Tire Black) for this.
21: A visible wash
I mixed a pretty thin wash of a different brown than before (ABT160 Engine Grease) to pin was the panel lines and the base of the gun barrel. Just like on the bottom of the tank, one by one I went through the panels, all the bolts, each sunk screw, the edges of the hatches and the armour plate joints with their flame cut edges. On some of them my wash worked very nicely, on some my wash was a bit too thin in this mix.
After that was done I returned back to the acrylic paints. To give some surface texture onto the used metal surfaces of the engineering tools and such I added a couple of drops of light grey (VGA 72749 Stonewall Grey) to a larger dash of German Grey (VMA 71052), a couple of drops of acrylic thinner and two drops of Vallejo's airbrush cleaner (I had heard that it also works nicely as a drying retardant). What I wanted to achieve was a really thin paint that could be blended handily.
This wash was dabbed randomly onto the metallic bits. Starting from that iron bit in the right front corner, I proceeded to the rear deck's ax, shovel, wrench, cable cutter's tip and mechanism bits, the towing hooks, crowbar, starter crank and the massive exhaust setup. The idea with this was to get an uneven "more lived" feeling to the otherwise flat surfaces.
I thought it turned out pretty ncie, especially on the shovel and the exhaust pipe setup.
22: Wood, rust, and a dot filtering test
My attempts at painting wooden parts had never been too successful. I thought I'd try a three colour approach this time: I'd paint them all (excluding the jack's handle that I simply forgot) with a darker wood colour (VMA 71036 Mahogany) as a basecoat adn to accentuate the deeper parts of the wood texture. While I was at it I misremembere the colour of the paper wrappings of the wire cutters, and I painted them dark yellow, purposefully imperfectly.
My next layer for the wooden parts was wood (VMA 71077 Wood), that I tried to paint in a linelike manner to fake some wood grain texture. I should've thinned it down and make it more like a wash, just like what I did for the metals a while earlier, or I should've first painted them wooden and then wash with a thin mahogany brown. This way they didn't look like wood at all.
I still had my bottle of even lighter colour good for this business (VMC 70819 Iraqui Sand), that I was going to use as the final highlight. The paint was bought in Spring 2011 for my SdKfz 251/1's crew, and I had used it immediately again in 2015 on my Falcon's Aggressor camo scheme. Now in 2023 the paint had finally gone weird, when I dropped some of it onto my jar lid palette. I thought that some of it was still usable for the last time, so I drew a few thin lines in places. The result was not good at all, so I needed to repaint them all.
At this point I repainted the wire cutter's handles, using reddish brown (VMA 71271 German Red
Brown) and I skipped brightening it, even though the actual colour had used to be a lighter red. While I was touching up on my mistakes, I painted the barrel cleaning rod's protector (I had thought it should've been some sort of a canvas sack, but this looked more like a tube) with German Grey.
With those out of the way I applied a thin light rust oil wash on my metallic parts, again in as random patches as I managed.
My rustification process started from the wrench and the C-hooks. Clearly all pieces but the shovel here had way too much rust on them, but I could fix that a bit later. My self-confidence in tinkering with the oil was clearly imrpoving, I even noticed it myself.
While deep in my madness I decided that I'd go for the dot filtering method as well. In the first round I limited my testing to use colours already on the model, I wasn't feeling confident enough to add even more colours yet. Olive green (ABT050), ocher (ABT092) and light sand (ABT155) all fit nicely to modify my Hinterhalt-Tarnung.
Perhaps I should've used a toothpick or something to make the dots instead of a paintbrush, so the dots would've been much smaller. But somehow I had to try it out, right? I started only on these two right side armour plates.
Of course I didn't own a dedicated blending brush, so I used one of the larger and soft-feeling brush from my set. I dipped it into the thinner, wiped most of that off to a kitchen paper, and started brushing in vertical movements.
After a bit of brushing the paints covered the underlying paintjob pretty comprehensively. I cleaned up my brush and continued blending, but now my brush had some more thinner on it, so I at the same time also removed some more paint. Clearly the brush I was using was suboptimal, as it left visible streaks on the surface, clearly visible in the photo #2 below.
While I was reducing the paint coverage, I also removed some of the rust I had applied earlire. When dry, they'd reveal their true faces.
23: Dark rust and more dot filtering
My first dot filtering had accidentally spread onto the roof of the casemate, so I had just the sides and the front left at this point, and I did that in a couple of separate runs. I managed to made smaller dots this time, but the toothpick idea had not yet struck me while working on them. Maybe the bext time.
The Engine Grease I had used for topside washing might not have been the best choice, especially the barrel's base had a bit too strong of the oily effect, I was blending it down a few times. At this point I tried to remind myself that the barrel itself was still unweathered, and I was not supposed to forget to do it later.
Generally speaking this round went nicer than the first one, but this other paintbrush I used this time wasn't good for this business, either. I would have to get better brushes for this work. The one I tried now lost some bristles, as you could notice in the photo below, on the top-left corner of the Balkenkreuz.
I then mixed some darker rusty goo (ABT070 Dark Rust), and applied it on all the metallic parts, and heavily on the tracks. My goal was to add some variety to the rust so that the brighter and older rust was under the fresher and wetter stuff.
The engineering tools were properly disgusting in their rustiness.
Looking at this photo later on I noticed that the front glacis plate had some ill-blended drops remaining. I just hadn't seen them the previous evening while looking at what I had achieved. This simply got fixed the next evening.
24: Rewash
The following evening I did, like I mentioned, a cleanup run. After that I made a new wash (ABT002 Sepia) for the panel lines and properly shadowy looking areas. Just like before, all the panel lines, edges, hinges, and whatnot got washed. It had been done before but now I was refreshing what had gotten toned down with the dot filtering. Again I worked on the gun barrel base' shadow effect, and a couple of places that I felt that needed a stronger shadow on them. For example, I did that on the sides of the engine vents, below the armour plates; and the roof's sliding panels' ends (in the right side of the photo the effect looks better than on the opposite side).
I also applied a generic shadow area onto the top half of the Panzerwanne's sides without thinking too much about it. I wanted to see how it looked like after drying, and if it didn't work, I'd just overpaint with the earth tones, knowing that most of it was blocked by the running gear anyway.
My exhaust pipe and the track link looked a bit too uniform after the dark rust, even though I had attempted to apply it randomly. Maybe I could apply a few random drops of light rust before going for the earth tones.
My horrendous attempt at wood painting reduced to experience of the rear deck quite badly. But like I had said before, they were on the top of the todo list now.
Thoughts about the oil paints
This pretty long post contained a bit over two weeks of testing and playing around in the calendar time, mostly concentrated on the oil paints that were a totally new thing to me. I hadn't prepared my model with a satin or gloss varnish in advance to help the washes flow easier, so I was painting directly on top of my acrylics.
In advance my biggest worry was the drying time of the oil paints. I knew they dried slowly (the painting-paintings could be wet for weeks, I had heard, but those people also worked with thicker coats and different methods), but I also had not heard or read before testing, how long they have to dry before you could clean up overflows with thinner, or how long you could allow them to dry before touching up mistakes became impossible.
Especially as my hobby time has been limited for a long time, a long minimum and a shortish maximum time might be a thing to prevent me from using these paints at all. Or in a difficult spot I could have the option of staring at the clock and the calendar, and only work with oils when I could guarantee to be able to return to my model within a tightly specified timeframe.
My time limit experience
The minumum time I didn't play much with yet, but if I painted something, proceeded forward, and returned half an hour later to wipe off the overflows, the original intentional paintjob didn't completely disappear. This would, with a bit of preparation, work with my own typical process, but it would limit my paintable parts quite severely.
I also didn't push with the maximum time much. My first attempt was between an evening and the next afternoon, meaning something like 18h, and the cleanup worked like a charm. Based on that experience I dared to leave my paints to dry a bit longer, 24h and 48h even, and encountered no problems. When I thought of it, all this stuff took about two weeks, so I hadn't yet had the time to try out a week (7*24h) and its effect on attempts at cleaning with thinner.
With this I could somehow reliably assume that my typical working gaps were not going to be disastrour or a problem of any sort. Of course, if I knew I was going to work on something, I would easily come back to it early, or delay my painting so that there was no known long delay in between.
The undo functionality
My more oil-experienced colleagues had praised the oil paints and their good feature of being able to just do a ctrl+z and undo whatever had gone wrong. I did not try to completely remove something I had painted, but I could verify that peeling off some excesses worked really nicely.
The oil paints were, based on this short time, much more forgiving than I had imagined, even if I had been directly told that yes, they truly are that forgiving.
