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Yesterday I had my Cawl all airbrushed with 4 different red's and sealed with Vallejo Gloss. Waited a day as is recommended and tried, yet again, to fiddle with oil washes to retain the colour gradient I built up.
Upon applying it already felt a bit strange - the oil wash couldn't wouldn't settle right. It clung to parts of the fold, but not all of them...
When the medium evaporated, it dried blotchy - not spread around in the folds of his robes as planned, but more concentrated and smeared.
My assumption was/is that the evaporating medium "pulled" the pigments back into the remaining medium (W&N odourless btw) due to surface tension and diffusion.
Aghast, I brushed it off as soon as I could, let it dry and tried the same with a pin wash of Agrax.
That stuff behaved like I had a freakin' lotus effect on the model! It formed droplets instead of settling like a wash is supposed to.

The only explanation I have for this kind of behavior is that the gloss varnish was SO glossy that the wash could not stick to it at all.
Did anyone else experience this?
The obvious solution is to not use gloss (which goes against everything I've read about oil washes) but satin instead.
It seems to work well enough on flat plates like Kastellans and/or horizontal lines...

I'll have to strip my model and redo it, so I'd rather not have to paint him up a third time...

Oh and another thing that came to mind - sometimes the pigments of the oils settle... for a lack of a better word... "dusty".
Pictures say more than words - heres a gallery of someone I chatted with about the issue a few hours ago.

https://imgur.com/gallery/Idi80

On the first image, on the cowl of the Dominus where the optics connect, you can see the way the pigments settled. Not a smooth shading, but more like tiny, dispersed dots.

I don't know why the oil didn't work.... but if you try and apply an acrylic pin wash after an oil even if you think you cleaned it, it's probably going to bead up because there'll still be some oil residue on the model.

You can get beading if the model is too glossy, but usually thinned out oils have enough bite to still spread nicely over it. If acrylics aren't spreading over a gloss surface you might need to add something like a flow improver to reduce the surface tension of the paint and increase the bite.

The oil drying grainy can be if there's a graininess to the underlying paint (so it settles in the very fine roughness of the underlying paint) or if the oil isn't fully mixed with the thinner or if you're using excessively cheap oil paints they can have a tendency to grain up if you try and manipulate them too much.

Also painting dark washes on to light colours like that is always more difficult because any flaws tend to show up very clearly.

Ah.. yes. That makes sense of course... oil residue.
The Agrax was more of a panicked try to save me the stripping... I usually do not tend to mix 2 types of washes, but good to know.
I think I get an idea that the non-biting issue and the perceived graininess I had sometimes come from the same issue.
While I do not use cheap oils (I saw them first in vids from BuyPainted and got that exact brand), I suppose I mix them wrong.
The oils and the medium seem to separate VERY fast, say within 30 seconds or so. Thinking about it that indicates that I need to use a flatter well and less medium... basically make the wash "thicker", with more pigment to spread around.

Now, where do I have a test model that I can.. erh...treat to some... experiments...

Aight.
Cawl was up and running again yesterday.
I did several things different:

- Using satin instead of gloss
- Using a flat well that largely helps with the separation of pigment and medium
- I also placed him upside down while drying so the wash runs below his metal carapace instead of pooling at the hem of the robes

The end result is not perfect by any means, but it is already way better and pretty acceptable. No graininess that I could spot, the wash didn't pull itself together for the most part (and if it did I can claim user mistake easily(, no beading.