Transcript
Experiment. A scientific procedure undertaken to make a discovery, test a hypothesis or demonstrate a known fact.
Let’s take this definition and make it our own, shall we?
Artistic experiment: a moment in time when an artist puts aside all expectation and discipline to feel the freedom of trying something new just for the fun and joy of it. Quickly followed by the inherent discovery and testing of new techniques.
This is the most fun I’ve had painting miniatures in a long time. Maybe ever!
INTRO
Greetings good humans and welcome to Tabletop Alchemy, where sometimes we stumble across something others have been doing for eons and realize we’re very very late to the game. And we thank our patrons for kindly supporting these exercises into newfound discoveries.
Today we’re going full Bob Ross and we’re casting aside any goals, expectations and worries brought about by “having to something right”. My buddy Hoffman was telling me about how years ago – and I mean decades – he would do a lot of his mini painting with inks, specifically the long-discontinued Games Workshop inks. He loved them and I always admired his painting chops, so I promptly engaged that hobbyist shopping module and went and got … too much stuff.
And then we hopped on a FaceTime call just to hang out and hobby. And I’ve got all these inks and new paints on my table and don’t quite know what to do with them. I know people have been painting with inks for decades but I’ve never really used them, so I was like “I want to try these out but what do I try them out on?”
And that’s when it hit me: it was time to leverage the Pile of Shame! I have this group of skeletons from the Cursed City box that I had started with the intention of using them as my first test subjects for oil washes, which is another technique I’ve never tried. I bought all the oil wash supplies like two years ago, maybe longer.
Lemme alone!
So I pulled one of these guys out and used it as a test subject. I thought, okay, fuck it, they’re just sitting over there gathering literal dust, let’s just grab one and try these inks out on it.
Now, this is the crux of today’s topic. I’ll talk through the painting I did, but here’s the TLDR: it’ll sound dumb but I’ve never grabbed a mini and just messed around with putting paint on it, never without the idea that I’m painting this figure to be a finished miniature.
I’ve never just thought, ok, let’s just play around, I’m not gonna fish this mini, let’s just do some tests and see what happens. And I’ll tell you what, this was so ridiculously fun. Liberating is what I’d really call it. I just used random colors and random techniques and I was just carefree. You’re gonna hear a lot of these words repeated, and you could ascribe that to enthusiastic emphasis. I can’t overstate how awesome this was, for me.
I don’t know the first thing about inks, and it just doesn’t matter. This miniature’s gonna look like a clown – and that simply doesn’t matter.
So I’ve got all these inks but I also, just the other day, picked up some of Vallejo’s version of Contrast paints, which they call Xpress Color. The reason I wanted to check them out is I read a review online that said they dry slower and flatter than GW Contrast paints. If anyone needs more working time, it’s me.
So we’re gonna play around with some of these closet skeletons and just have fun.
I’m also trying out a new camera position which worked nicely, except for the fact that my hair got into almost every shot. Now I know, you’re like, “dude, Ignatius, didn’t you just buy a camera that had live HDMI out so you could monitor your shots?”
Yes. Yes I did, dear viewer, exactly that. And what happened is, when I looked up to check the framing and focus, my hair would leave the shot, so I didn’t realize what was happening.
laugh it up fuzzball
Okay, I started out with some AK Interactive sepia ink for the breastplate. I thinned it down a little with water and just wanted to see what this color was like. I’ve noticed the AK brand sepia and burnt umber are a lot more gray than other brands but all good, this is what experimenting is all about.
So to see some actual “brown” colored ink, I tried this Daler Rowney burnt umber on the scale mail. Basically each part of the model represents a test area for something, right? So I put full strength burnt umber on the lower scale mail stuff and then thinned it out for on the upper scales, just to see what the difference was like.
One thing I’ve been noticing with inks is they seem to help me with learning glazing. Working with ink is pretty fun because they are so fluid but the glazing is great because they’re highly pigmented as well as thin. So I glazed some Daler Rowney purple into the breastplate just to practice adding some shadow. The purple is cool but what if we glaze some Liquitex burnt sienna and carbon black over that purple? Pretty fun just messing with the colors like this.
Okay, let’s try some of these Xpress Colors – I’m thinning this wasteland brown way down with the xpress medium and trying it out on the skelly’s bones. Two things of immediate note: one, the xpress paint is pretty nice, easily on par with Citadel’s Contrast line; two, this paint smells like Vallejo added some kind of perfume to it – they didn’t of course but there is a definite weirdly fruity sweet smell to this paint. And their inks smell like this too. I’m very susceptible to harsh chemical fumes but this stuff doesn’t bother me, I’ve just never used an acrylic hobby paint – other than Tamiya paints – that have a tangible odor.
Now this line of metallic colors from Vallejo Metal Color is hands down the best metallic paints I’ve ever come across. This copper is awesome. Now let’s try out this dark turquoise ink. I watered it way down to see what it does over the copper. I think it’s pretty cool! Maybe it’s not the correct color for verdigris but who cares?
Now for a great big experiment: what will thinned down burnt sienna do as a wash over all this yellow? Again, this is the luxury of just messing around – it doesn’t matter, we’re just gonna find out! I definitely need to experiment more with trying to get it smooth but the overall weathered look is pretty good.
How about on the back side we mix purple with burnt umber and try that? I must say I’m pretty happy I have a Pile of Opportunity to leverage this way, this is just so fun! So this mix was a bit too thin to make a dramatic change, so I just got some less diluted and tried adding that to the deeper areas on the tabard.
I missed capturing putting some green Vallejo ink on this vambrace but here I’m deepening the shadows by glazing some more into it.
All right, how about some Vallejo yellow ink full strength all over the shield? Why? I don’t know. I just wanted to try the yellow ink out somewhere and so there we go!
Now I also picked up some bottles of Vallejo’s new formula game color. I got some purple because I don’t typically paint much purple and I wanted to see what this new formula is like. So here’s midnight purple on the spear blade, it’s very fluid and nice to work with, feels kinda like a thinner version of Citadel paint.
Also, I swear this is not a sponsored video by any of the companies I mention today.
I used a lighter shade of purple to blend up some highlights and one of the properties of this new formula is it stays wetter longer and I’m really like this stuff. Damn, I might have to get some more colors!
I put some AK sepia ink on the haft of the spear just to see what it looked like full strength. It’s a pretty dark warm gray, I just don’t know why they call it sepia. I could always mix in some red ink if I wanted to make it more “sepia”, maybe.
I picked up this Daler Rowney sap green ink just cause I liked the color, so I’m trying it out here on our guy’s metal nikes, and this is a great color! Some of this I’m thinning, some not, I didn’t keep track cause I’m a wild man!
All right, for these leather straps I’m gonna try out the AK ink called Sooty Black, and we’ll put it down full strength. It reminds me of a cross between Citadel’s Black Legion and Basilicanum gray, but it’s thinner and flows easier obviously because it’s an ink. I like this stuff, nice to work with.
I wanted to try the dark turquoise ink full strength so why not put some on the yellow shield? Why not try out making a blend from the yellow into blue shadow? Using some water to thin it and smooth the transition really made for a nice gradient. I’ve always had problems doing this with regular paint!
I have this raw sienna that I’ve used like once, but I thought it might be a perfect shading for the yellow, so on it goes. I think it’s a good weathering color for the yellow and at first I thought I wouldn’t put it over the blue but then I thought “it’s a pretty light color, it might just unify the whole thing.” So onto the blue it went.
Now this, my friends, is my new favorite go-to dark steel color – Vallejo metal color gunmetal. This is 100% replacing my standard Scalecolor black metal paint. As I mentioned earlier, this metal color line is staggeringly awesome. Why am I putting purple on the spear blade? Because! And now I’m putting some thinned down xpress color copper brown over that spear just to see what it does, the idea being maybe it’ll create some rusty weathering.
I just kept going with that gunmetal, adding some chipping and little pops of metallic shine on the edges of things. This shield is literally surprising me with how cool it’s coming out. Does it look realistic? We don’t care! The real question is: do we care? No, ‘cause it looks rad!
I like these metal highlights so much I just started adding them to other bits and pieces everywhere. This is another advantage to painting a skeleton, though, right? Weathering and dirty paint jobs are kinda the the effect.
I put full strength Daler Rowney burnt umber and AK burnt Umber on the base, just to check ‘em out. Their consistency and high pigment makes them pretty ideal for quickly covering bases.
For some specific rust color, I mixed yellow ink, red ink and xpress copper brown and thinned the mix with water. I even put some rust on the shield. As Hoffman would say, we’re going full clown suit. Does bronze or copper rust? Nope, but say it with me now: who cares?!
Someone out there does care, deeply, and they’re having a conniption fit right about now. You’re welcome!
And I’m gonna double down and throw some verdigris on the shield too! Right next to the rust! This guy might be actually usable. I mean like he may be graduating from test subject to tabletop.
Okay, so I originally thought I’d use this guy for the oil test on top of everything else. But I decided I like how he turned out, so I’m gonna splash up two more skellies specifically to try the oil washes on. We’re not gonna watch all that of course – except for these two tidbits here.
I decided to tint this guy’s bones with some green, like he’s a mossy skeleton or something. I mixed xpress color orc skin with dwarf skin and thinned it out and I kinda like how it looks.
I also got what’s knowns as a “wild hair” and washed some purple over that yellow tabard just to see what it would do. It didn’t go on as smoothly as some of the other inks, so i’m just making a mental note of that. Good for chunky weathering maybe.
Now here’s a third skeleton and the reason I’m doing two to test oils on is I’m gonna gloss coat one of them to see how much of a difference that makes in working with the oil wash. But most of the inks dry to a satin finish anyway so this might not be much of a difference test.
But I do want to show you this one thing that works out pretty good. Some thinned down xpress wasteland brown did a pretty nice job of shading the tabard, I was pretty happy to see that. That’s definitely something to keep in mind.
Ah and one more detail, right here. I mixed some xpress storm blue with the xpress white color and check it out, it kinda makes a decent nonmetallic metal thing right? It’s not contrasty enough but still, pretty cool for a single coat of paint.
All right I let the gloss coat dry for 24 hours, not sure if that was necessary but you know, relax when you can right?
So I mixed up a wash with the Mona Lisa stuff and a bit of black and bit of burnt umber oil paint and here goes nothing. Right away this is looking too thin to me. So I gonna add some more black for attempt number two, and this is much better I think.
We just slop this stuff on, just making sure it gets everywhere. The gloss coat definitely makes the oil slide off the raised areas way more than it does on the non-gloss coated figure. One huge advantage to oils is they just don’t dry, you have plenty of working time. The main pain in the butt with this oil stuff its trying to keep all the tools, brushes, palette – which is metal by the way – and paper towels with oil thinner on them, keeping all that stuff separate from any water stuff. Having never painted with oils before, all this is new to me.
I waited 20 minutes before going back over the minis with a q-tip sponge thing that was dampened with a little bit of thinner. I can see already that this procedure is another technique that’s easy to do but hard to master. I also think that this oil wash technique would be good to try on a mini that’s been painted in a more clean and proper fashion to see what it does. Because of the hours-long drying time, the option to go back and add more or remove more remains viable for quite a while.
So, here they are, the subjects of the artistic experiment sessions. They’ve all been matte varnished and based. This was my very first one, the one that kicked off this whole thing. You can see I had a sword here to mess around with and I did most of the inks on this one full strength. And this one my buddy Hoffman did when he came up for a visit and wanted to try out Contrast paints for the first time.
And here are three we did in today’s video and the oil wash really did a great job. This is the first one and it didn’t get the oil wash. Overall I dig this guy, but I could see now maybe putting an oil wash on him just to get a little more patina across all the surfaces and some better outlining.
This guy had the gloss coat put on before the oil wash and he looks pretty good too. The oil wash seems to work like a matte coat as well, not insofar as making a matte finish – all of these have been matte coated as the last step – but the oil wash does work towards unifying all the different surfaces. I think I need to try an oil wash on some figures that aren’t heavily weathered beforehand, just to see what it does then. These guys were pretty well weathered prior to the oil wash.
This dude got the oil wash without a gloss coat and I’m not sure there’s too much of difference – between using a gloss coat and not. There’s some for sure, I just need less heavily weathered test subjects to get a more accurate idea I think of what it’s doing. But as far as what the oil wash does, this little bit here, his exposed ribs, I didn’t have any shading in there at all and the wash really filled in those recesses in a pretty nice way. All in all, I do enjoy the oil washes, they just have that annoying 24 hour drying time to consider. Which isn’t really that big of a deal, but it’s a thing.
Here’s the guy with and without the oil wash – the wash is fairly subtle but overall you can see how it unified the feel of all the different bits. And you can see how the various inks and paints have different finishes, from glossy to satin to flat. Now of course the final matte coat does a lot toward this too but the oil wash definitely adds some depth and lining to the figure.
It was just so much fun to mess around and try stuff out with no expectations – and the idea that there just weren’t any mistakes made everything take on this totally carefree, have-fun-with-paints vibe that I just had to share. This mindset is a new one for me and I learned quite a bit. Mostly I learned that I need to paint with this mindset going forward. Well, not really that I NEED to, but I WANT to.
So again, this exercise has been the most fun I’ve had painting minis in a long time. And it’s not like I haven’t enjoyed painting minis, not at all, but I feel like I’ve unlocked a new level in my head.
So, go grab a mini outta that pile of shame – yeah, THAT pile of shame <snap> – and just have some fun experimenting with it. Try out some inks! Or whatever strikes your fancy. It’ll be a good time, trust me.
See ya!