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Every time I do flat armor like on a rhino, its blotch and ugly. Dipping dosent work. Watering it down dosent work. Applying with a large brush dosent work. Applying slowly with a large brush dosent work. Sponging it on dosent work. And If I do duncans method of just using it for the recesses, it then is way brighter than my marines armor.

HALP!

Apply thinned, carefully with a fine point brush into recesses only. If you're trying to knock back the tone over the whole vehicle then you either need to glaze (very thin, even application - wide flat brushes help) or work black into your base colour to keep it muted.

Takes some forethought if you're trying to match another painting, which it sounds like you are.

Could go the other way which is to absolutely swamp the vehicle so it goes dark all over and then highlight back up.

Apply matt varnish before the ink wash - this will let you apply a fairly even tint.

(the opposite is true as well, gloss varnish will cause the ink to flow cleanly into the recesses and panel lines)

From my own experience and from other posts:

Use a gloss coat over the model.
You may want to get flow aid and put a drop in with the nuln oil or whatever wash you are using so it flows more.
Apply with a small brush into recesses.
Any splotchy bits you notice are easily removed with a makeup sponge / applicator.

I only ever use washes on vehicles in the recesses and around rivets. If you watch the GW painting tutorials on Youtube they do it that way too. You don't have to worry about gross splotchy shoring on all the surfaces, and you use a lot less wash that way. If you're having trouble with your vehicles now being darker than your Marines, then you should be bringing up your Marines to that same shade while leaving the wash in the recesses on them, or mixing a darker shade of your base color to more closely approximate that shade.

I have trouble because my vehicles are brighter than my marines without nuln oil. They are under coated red.

So your core issue here isn't really how to use Nuln Oil.

If I understand it the issue is that you primed your vehicles with red primer, and that shade of red doesn't match the rest of your army because it's too bright. To compensate for that brightness, you've been trying to use Nuln Oil to shade your vehicles so the red isn't so bright, but you're not getting the results that you want.

Is that it?

There's a few ways out of this I can see.

First, if you have any other vehicles primed that you haven't started on, re-prime them with black. Then start in with the red from scratch on a darker undercoat.

Second, use a large brush and give your model a coat of a darker red color, like Khorne Red. Then highlight or drybrush the model back up to a brighter red like Evil Sunz Scarlet. Edge highlight with some Orange or White, depending on how bright you want it to look. This choice is the most work-intensive, and probably why you primed the model red to begin with... so you wouldn't have to go through all this.

Third, mix your bright red color like Evil Sunz Scarlet with just tiny bit of black, and water it down bunch. Use this sort of like a shade, paint it near all the recesses of the model, but don't do it on the flat surfaces. Then when that's done, you can drybrush with normal Evil Sunz scarlet around where you put the shade. This can give you a decent "blended" effect between the shaded areas and the brighter areas. The bright areas of the model will still be bright, but with the shading in all the recesses, the whole model will "look" darker.

Hope some of that is helpful... pictures of the model and what you're trying to do would be helpful.

Thinning it down and applying multiple thin coats with a large brush should work. you could try the matte varnish as someone mentioned earlier (will let the wash spread more evenly over the surface).

Be careful not to go over the same area twice because you'll end up with a blotchiness where the fresh paint washes over the dried or partially dried paint. For that reason you kind of have to go panel by panel, make sure you completely coat a panel before moving on to the next one so you don't end up going over partially dried wash a 2nd time.

Illtry the matter varnishe suggestion. Gone too far on slot of things to start from scratch

I don't use a wash on my vehicles but I do use the Quickshade varnish applied with a brush. I keep a q-tip with some mineral spirits on hand to roll over areas where I don't want the shade and it recovers the highlight.

After everything is completely dry, it will be blotchy with gloss and dull areas instead of the dark blotches you get. A quick coat of any varnish (matte, satin, or gloss) brings everything back up to the same finish. Everything in my gallery has been done this way.

If I get some pledge future shine, and mix 3 parts pledge to 1 part nuln oil, will it go over smoother, or still give me the blotcheyness?

That'd probably do it, i have some here i will test for you tonight

 Orock wrote:
If I get some pledge future shine, and mix 3 parts pledge to 1 part nuln oil, will it go over smoother, or still give me the blotcheyness?

The key thing to remember with varnish is a gloss coat will give a smooth finish and make washes easier to run into recesses. Matte varnish will make the surface rougher and make the wash spread more evenly.
In your case you're going to want a Matte finish for an even finish, so I wouldn't recommended pledge/future.

What you need is what the Military Modelling world calls a 'Filter'. You want a very thin layer of paint to tint the base colour, and in your case make it darker. There's a few ways you can do this, and I'd recommend practising on something else first.

1 - Using your Nuln Oil. Use a Glaze Medium such as Vallejo's or GWs Lahmian Medium to thin the Nuln Oil down in combo with Water. Apply multiple thinned coats all over the model with a large brush, allowing each one to dry fully before adding the next layer. Watch for paint pooling and tidy this up as soon as it does.
2. Use a ready made filter, such as those from Mig/Ammo http://www.migjimenez.com/en/20-filters?. You'll probably want one of the Browns to darken the red down.
3. The method I use, lots of fun but a bit more involved - the oil dot filter technique https://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=9&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0ahUKEwi2i4eTopLKAhUFtQ8KHadfDOAQFghRMAg&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.missing-lynx.com%2Farticles%2Fother%2Foilpaintrenderingmr_1.html&usg=AFQjCNEtHlfaXXlQOllVDj-M-yMc-05FYA

After you've done your filter to match the shade on your Marines, then I'd give the model a coat of pledge/future. When that has dried, use pure Nuln Oil into the recesses only on the tank. Matte varnish back up again after.

Orock wrote:If I get some pledge future shine, and mix 3 parts pledge to 1 part nuln oil, will it go over smoother, or still give me the blotcheyness?

kb_lock wrote:That'd probably do it, i have some here i will test for you tonight

Results aren't good at the moment, I'll let you know how it dries.

This is nuln oil with pledge in about 1:3 on a flat white disk. I also did it to a dreadnought, but it looked like it was already washed (and it was bronze)

I will see how it has dried tomorrow, but at this stage it doesn't look like it has alleviated the problem at all - you could probably commission someone to airbrush it, or buy a ridiculously cheap nail art airbrush from ebay to do it

Thanks for trying. I DO have an airbrush, but no compressor nor money for one. And canned air has clogged with every GW paint I have tried, even after thinning to the consistancy of milk with Windex. I wonder if nuln oil would clog. Those cans of compressed air are worthless.

You'd be hard pressed clogging an airbrush with nuln oil, even less so if you watered it down a bit.

Got a spare car tyre?

Do you think if I hit the model first with testors dull cote, then washed with the ink mabye deluted with some water, it would go on smoother?

No, but, you're in luck - this might do it;

http://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/675520.page

That's actually similar to a technique I use to weather aircraft... I didn't think to mention it in this thread because my mind was stuck on Nuln Oil.

I'm not sure how well it'd work on Space Marine tanks though, it works well on aircraft because aircraft have large curving surfaces which you can work with a tissue to clean up the wash, as there's a lot of rubbing involved

I use oil paints rather some fancy paint specifically designed for the task You thin them down with white spirit (I don't thin too much, the more you thin it the more it'll tend to cling to the surface and won't rub off as the white spirit tends to dig in to the underlying surface), apply it over a gloss surface, wait a few minutes for it to start to dry (I usually just do 1 wing at a time on an aircraft). Then grab a tissue and start rubbing it off. Keep rubbing until you're happy with the results.

However it's more of a method for doing panel lines in aircraft than anything, I used that technique on this wing, it's how I darkened the rivets, added the hint of gun smoke staining and also how I added the brown dirty look in to the wheel well and around the control surfaces (the panels toward the trailing edge of the wing). I adapted the technique from PLASMO's youtube channel, he uses it a lot on his aircraft. The main difference between my technique and his is that I don't thin my oils as much, I put them on as thick as I can and still have them fall in to the panel lines and rivets (if you don't thin at all they tend to sit on top of the panel lines instead of going in to them). That was I can create the blending effects you see in the wheel well and control surfaces. But otherwise the technique is the same.

This video at 8:20 shows it: https://youtu.be/prPeSlciaLY?t=8m24s

Or this video from around 13:00: https://youtu.be/RSzNMbrnR44?t=13m1s

I'm not sure it's going to give you the effect you want on a Space Marine tank though.

I still reckon you can get a Nuln Oil was to work, if I can find a vehicle to test it on when I get back from work I'll have a go. One thing that might work that I experimented with last night (not in the context of tanks, but again trying to get smooth finishes on aircraft) is mixing Army Painter inks (basically the same as GW's old washes) with Humbrol Acrylic Thinners. HAT have brilliant self levelling properties, it massively slows the drying, but the wash goes on much smoother. I haven't tested it on a large surface like a tank though.

Rubbing white spirit over a painted surface sounds like a pretty terrible idea, it's specifically why i only oil was recesses, the finish is bad, assuming it survives.

kb_lock wrote:
Rubbing white spirit over a painted surface sounds like a pretty terrible idea, it's specifically why i only oil was recesses, the finish is bad, assuming it survives.

Well I don't use a whole heap of white spirit and as with any of those weathering techniques you apply a gloss coat first and wait a couple of days for it to cure first. I haven't had any problem with it damaging the underlying paint work even though I rub quite vigorously. It works... on aircraft... but aircraft have big smooth surfaces that are easy to rub off. The advantage of using as oil to do it is that any unevenness gets blended together as you rub, that's why I used that method to get the brown staining on the control surfaces, it gives an almost-airbrushed finish.

I'm not sure it's going to give you the effect Orock wants though.

I'll test thinning down wash with humbrol thinner, I reckon that might be the ticket as it self levels beautifully, but I'll test it before suggesting you go out and buy it.

When I did it to a rhino, it was terrible. This was over well dried Vallejo Gloss. To be honest, when I saw the video I was concerned that even the clay would cause damage (much like toothpaste)

You also use enamels, don't you? The videos you linked do.

I use whatever I have on hand. That Spit was Vallejo PU primer (which I'll never use on an aircraft again because it doesn't hold up well to masking and can't be sanded). The underside was humbrol acrylic, the upper side was vallejo model colour in the brown areas and the green areas was vallejo model colour over coated with humbrol enamel. I did some weathering with tamiya acrylics. The whole thing was then over coated with humbrol gloss clear before doing the oil and rubbing technique and finished off with Vallejo satin PU varnish.

I've done the same technique over Vallejo air, reaper, gunze acrylic, gunze lacquer and testors enamel, they all hold up fine. The only one I had a problem with was when I did it over metals, Vallejo metal colour, gunze lacquer metals, testors lacquer metals... they're all very delicate and won't take any rubbing before they just lift off.

kb_lock wrote:
No, but, you're in luck - this might do it;

http://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/675520.page

I really want it to be that easy, but I have a feeling it will turn out crap.

It would probably be your best bet at this stage. Winterdyne gave you the real answer which was to not wash your normal miniatures in the first place so you can better replicate the colour. It's harsh, but it'd be the clay or repaint naturally darker

I have the same problem with using nuln oil over large areas. I am painting gold, and it is even and nice looking right up until I wash the whole area with nuln oil. I work my way up to an auric gold coat. While I like the look of it, I prefer it slightly dulled down, which is what the oil is for. On my troops or smaller areas it is not a bother, but over large areas ala my ghost ark body it comes off bad. While it is not uber noticable, it is annoying when closely inspected I would also like to keep the consistency between my troops and vehicles the same.

Should I be applying a matt varnish over the gold before washing it with nuln oil? Or should I find another way to darken the gold slightly?

I'm going to have a play when I get home from work in a few hours, I'm sure I can get something to work, because I've seen several tanks where filters have been applied with a brush and came out smooth.

Sorry, I have been asking for help from people and this is the first time I have actually posted pictures of WHAT I needed help with. The first pic is what it looks like before the nuln oil, the second is a different one, you can see how much it has toned it down. And while it matches my marines in tone who dont look nearly at blotchy because its more round surfaces than big flat ones, its just messy looking. Third pic is side by side for comparison. I still need to touch up the right brighter one too