Oily washes

Sepia

 

The first hour

One evening I started by thinning a bit of Sepia (ABT002) into a wash. My Dire Wolf had been in the front of the queue from the beginning so it got the first treatment here as well. How to start with something new? By dropping a poolful of dark wash onto the largest cockpit canopy chunk, how else? I had thought in my twisted mind if I could get some funky cockpit jeweling effects done with oils, but this wasn't going to be the paint nor the method for it.

I went methodically through all the panels and edges from top to bottom. This time I knew to stress little about overflow, but I still didn't just slather the thing with my wash.

With the Dire Wolf highlighted without incidents I decided I could start with the Mad Dog. The method was the same, I simply highlighted the bits that the camouflage paints had toned down.

Somehow I still had some time to spare afterwards, so I started cleaning up the Dire Wolf's panels and other bits. Yes, I know I had been praising how ridiculously easy and simple it was to undo oil painting, but oh my how great it was!

Here I took a photo of two pin-washed and cleaned up Points with the three Points still waiting for their turn. This made them look much nicer, let's see what the gently buff layear I had thought of would do to them later on. Of course all of them would first need to wait for a day or two first, so I could avoid excess messiness.

Funny how different the greens of the Dire Wolf and Mad Dog were. The Mad Dog had a much better shade of green, I wished I had written that one down.

The second and third hours

The next time I got to paint I followed the exact same process with the remaining Points, starting from the canopies and then from the highest point down to the toes. All the panel lines, edges, holes, gaps and anything that might have benefited from a bit of an artificial shadow, every single one got pin washed.

Of course this took a silly amount of time, so just when I got done with the pin washing, I only got to start cleaning up Gargoyle's jade mohawk when I had to wrap up for the day. Then I had a three-day hobbytime break due to life in general. I was super happy again that the paintbrush barely moistened with thinner just did the trick and I could keep cleaning up my overflowed pin washes.

Looking at these photos I noticed that I should clean Dire Wolf's viewports quite a bit more still, under a better light. I had just chosen a badly lit spot the last time, so the end result wasn't quite what I wanted. Like I said in the previous post, I had had some megalomaniacal thoughts of doing jeweling with oils but at least with these colours and in this scale it wasn't going to happen.

Looking at it I thought that I could paint the tubelike thing from the top of Summoner's LRM launcher (between the tube and the head) with a dark grey. Not necessarily with the GG so that it wouldn't get visaually mixed with cannons and stuff, but somehow, to make it stand out a little more.

Gargoyle looked uglier and uglier. Maybe these panel highlights enhanced its roughness.

Mad Dog felt like it benefit greatly from the highlights. I should clean up its canopies as well before declaring the end being nigh, but these were tiny things now. At some point I realized that this version of Mad Dog didn't have the missile tips poking out of the LRM launcher unlike in the more emaciated IWM miniature. If I was entirely mad, I might consider trying to paint red tips into these launch tubes, but I wasn't quite sure if I was there quite yet.

Another gainer was Hellbringer's torso with the CASE panels and other details popping out so much better. This version of its missile launcher also hid the missile tips so I couldn't paint them either, and I really didn't see myself painting them red with white caps - inside their tubes.

Yeah, you could definitely see more details from these now, and the overall paintjob didn't feel like it got severely toned down.