Blending with oils

Well, mini painting is definitely a challenge for me. The different techniques -blending especially- with acrylics are kind of difficult and they take a long time to achieve. It is a lot of practice and patience to force the quick drying acrylic paints do things they would not be doing normally -too much for me, to be honest. I did, however, find the light… in the form of a couple of youtube videos.

One of the most useful -or rather, eye opening- was this one:

So obviously I decided to give it a try. I used a Warlord Titan head by Forgeworld as a test piece. (As a side-note: JESUS CHRIST, IT GOT EVEN MORE EXPENSIVE -it was about 60 quids when I bought it a long, long time ago).

It has been painted in a blue/white scheme, but was just sitting in the “to do” pile” as it looked very bland and clean, and I had no idea who to proceed apart from adding some stains and streaks. But now… I have been using oils on minis before, but this was, I think, the most extensive use yet.

As per the video I based the mini with white and blue paint, and started adding different colors.

With the white I went with a dirty look (not that kind). I added raw umber out of the tube to the edges, and using a dry brush I spread it out a bit, adjusting constantly. It made the surface used filthy and also three dimensional, by adding some shadow effects as well. Then I picked burned umber and repeated the process on a smaller area (signifying darker shadows, closer to the edges), and repeated it with black using it on a very small surface. A day or two after I used a brush moistened with ZestIt to remove some of the paint, adjusting the effect, and to create some faint streaks.

With the blue I went with a similar route first: adding darkened spots, shadows to the edges, lightening up the middle with lighter colors. However I also added highlights to the panel edges as an experiment. It something that is not easy to do with a brush, and which requires a lot of masking with an airbrush. The results were pretty impressive considering the amount of time and effort they took (which was very little). First I used a light blue color to create a gradient, and then repeated the process with white on a smaller area -and it is done. If you want to smoothen it even more, you can adjust it with a slightly moistened brush after a couple of days of drying.

Really simple, really effective. The drawback is that the paint takes a long time to dry. However it is not as if I do not have a ton of other projects waiting for me to finish… So here it is. A simple, fast way to blend. Not sure if I will get a Golden Daemon for it (well…) but as a technique it is more to my taste: does not require an immense investment of time and effort… The lazy man’s blending, I guess.

The head is not yet complete – I will add some more tonal variation, some streaks, etc, once the paint had dried, and I can seal it with varnish. I will also go over the Imperial Knight I built to spice it up a bit.

In the process of blending

Finished article (for now)

Adding dark paint to the corners, bright colors to the middle

Finished

Raw umber applied

I quickly painted the gold edges to give a better idea how it will look