Sunday, February 12, 2012

Washes, Inks, Glazes or ?

When painting up your miniatures, what does everyone use in terms of washes, inks, glazes and other additives?

I started off with inks for the most part. I bought the really small Citadel pots that were drop squeezer bottles. They were fun stuff. I've never really 'mastered' that process but I still pop inks out to add some 'depth' to a color, to intensify it I guess.

With washes, they seem to do a lot of the work. Games Workshop dropped their inks and went to washes. I remember hearing the collective sigh of the internets that chestnut ink, long a favorite of gamers everwhere for flesh, fur, leather and other bits, was no longer available, but a sigh of relief that the washes, especially sepia and mud seemed to work pretty well.

I have some Andrea paints. Two of the sets I have, silver and gold, come with inks. These are old school and have to be thinned down tremendously. I've been using them a bit with these black blood orcs from Chronopia that I'm trying to finish off. That won't happen tonight as I'm up way past my bed time and waiting for the last round of black ink to dry off. For silver, there's brown, ultra-marine blue, and black inks. For gold, there's chestnut, black, and yellow. That yellow is the last touch I'm looking for but when I do it, I'll also touch up the yellow clothing on the orcs at the same time so it'll be a double purpose use.

And Privater Press has inks and washes. They have a flesh wash and an armor wash and all their other colors are inks. They recommend a lot of thinned down ink glazes over the red for the Khador forces and the thing that is terrible about that, is first, preventing the ink from pooling and creating splotches, and second, waiting for the ink to dry between layers.

Oh well, enough of my rambling. What's everyone else do?

3 comments:

  1. Matte Medium is how you avoid the pooling/splotching.

    I use the GW washes almost exclusively at this point: sometimes straight from the pot, but more often mixed. I find I like the more complex tones I get from combining different washes. Also, I tend to get great results by thinning the washes with water and matte medium.

    So, I'll do things in a ratio of 3:2:(3 or 2:1)... 3 drops of water, 2 drops of matte medium, 3 drops of wash (or two drops of one color wash, 1 drop of another.

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  2. My favorite mix from GW is probably the sepia and mud. I'd like it if GW actually made those pots into larger bottles for dipping.

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  3. While I'm not sure it'd be the best use of Devlan Mud to dip (almost as easy to just brush it on heavily, and besides: that stuff's too expensive to waste by flicking off!), I'd certainly appreciate it if I could get it in larger bottles so it'd last longer. :)

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