I ordered hobby supplies from www.basecrafts.com and I have been delighted with the service and speed of delivery. Sometimes I find it can take up to a month to get a delivery from Britain across the Irish Sea but not with this company. I ordered last week and it arrived within seven days.
So what did I order?
I've been wanting to try out Secret Weapon Washes for a long time and I took the opportunity to order ten of them. (including the beautifully named "Baby Poop"). Because of this order I got a free full sized tub of weathering powder. I also got a large tub of Vallejo Grey Pumice and some water effects.
I had a look at the Washes coming out of the packaging and there was some definite sediment.
But after a quick 30 second shake, sediment be gone!
I'm really looking forward to trying these washes out.
So over the last week I have been attempting to try and learn the two-brush blending technique. I do remember hearing about this techniques at some stage before but it was not something that had registered with me. But I stumbled on the following video's and thought it might be worth a try.
After a couple of hobby related incidents I had just stripped and cleaned the Colman Stryker mini from the Cynar battlebox from the last post so decided that he'd be a perfect project to try and learn and develop this technique on.
First stop was a white undercoat and then a basecoat of GW Dheneb Stone on his cloak. I then give it a very watered down wash of Asurman Blue.
So I picked out two VGC paints, Khaki and Bonewhite to highlight the cloak with and set out on my first attempt at two-brush blending. After an hour or two of fiddling around, brush licking, head scratching, spit dribbling painting later I achieved this!
Fairly muck in my eyes! Tide marks and streaks all over the place, no solid coverage, just a general mess of a paint job. Here's a cropped photo to highlight the messiness of it all!
I had a general idea that I was making a couple of mistakes, firstly I didn't think I was leaving enough time for the first layer of paint to be dry before I painted the second layer, secondly I had a vague notion that I was wet blending incorrectly. I was using the blending brush to drag the paint away from the initial application and it dawned on me during the process maybe I should be zig-zaging the brush along the edge of the paint layer.
So to the internet and found these from McVey studio's (awesome painters and company!)
These video's really helped me an awful lot and while confirming my inital suspicions about the above two mistakes they also seem to have pointed out another large mistake I have been making that I hadn't even thought about. This was the amount of paint I had been applying to the mini initially. I had been applying my paint as I normally would when I use my usual layering technique, in long lines down the raised ridges of the cloak. As I keep my paint thin (like a good boy) this meant that by the time I had gotten to line it had already started to dry and I just ended up pushing half dried paint around the mini.
So my lightbulb moment was less paint is more! If I added a small spot of the paint rather than a big long line like I would edge highlighting, the paint will not dry as quickly and I won't be pushing gunk around the mini.
I did not have a lot of time yesterday evening, but after my guitar class I re-basecoated the cloak/coat/tunic with VGC Khaki and tried to shade using the "spot" two brush blending. While I only spent maybe fifteen minutes, it seemed to work a lot better. Unfortunately I didn't take any pictures but I will have some tomorrow.
