Trenloe Complete

Finally complete! It's been several weeks since my last update, but I haven't stopped painting in that time - unfortunately the advice I've read is to leave oil-based washes for 24-48 hours to dry before either re-washing or varnishing and moving on to the next stage. Because I've been super-busy with work, I usually only get time to paint on weekends, so that's meant I only get to paint one wash layer before packing up for the weekend. Very frustrating slowness, but the results are more than worth it.

So, from where we were at the last update, I washed the silver armour with Windsor & Newton black oil paint (heavily thinned with odorless methylated spirits), and the gold with Burnt Umber. This provided a fantastic effect on the brown but I struggled quite a lot with the black - the goal of using oil-based washes is it provided a much lower surface tension compared to water-based acrylics, so it flows much better over the miniature and tends not to leave tide-lines.

The problem is that is has a much lower surface tension and flows much better over the miniature, so I ended up getting it literally everywhere!  Luckily, removing oil-based wash from a miniature once dry is as simple as wetting a clean brush with thinner and carefully brushing over areas you want to remove - it comes right off without leaving any staining at all on the layer beneath. This is why it's taken so long for me to finalise the miniature - I washed, touched up, washed, and re-touched up. So that's 4 x 48hours...

Anyway, once that was finished I edge-highlighted the silver and gold with the original Liquid Gold colours, and I spent a fair bit of time glazing the face as I really wasn't happy with how it was looking. To be honest, I'm still not happy with how it turned out, and it's likely the last time I'll be using the Vallejo Game Air range for flesh-tones again - Bronze Flesh is way too yellow and very difficult to bring warmth back to the overall tone. Probably just my lack of skill, but I think I'll stick to Vallejo Game Colour moving forward as they have a much nicer general Fleshtone colour to use as a base tone.

In the background, I've also spent some time mixing up my own acrylic washes. I frequently have issues using Vallejo's Game Colour Washes (I find them way too thick, and difficult to thin properly), and to be honest I really, really miss the old hex-pot based Citadel washes. Anyway, I've followed advice from Lester Bursley Miniatures and mixed Water (10 parts water : 1 part Liquitex Flow-Aid) and Matte Medium - 50:50, and then added various Daler Rowney acrylic-based inks to create a range of colours. My early tests with the final product are pretty promising but more on that as time progresses.

Here's my final pictures - still a bit messy, but very much keen to move on! Next up will be a bit of deviation from my normal Descent miniature painting, more on that in my next post. Until then, happy hobbying!