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What’s the difference between a prebottled wash such as Citadel or Vallejo, vs mixing a oil wash with mineral spirits?

For this specific project, I’m wanting to do the recessed lines on some Tau models a bright blue. I’ve done the recessed lines on Eldar with Citdel washes straight from the bottle and they seem to work fine - what extra benefit, if any, would I get from making an oil wash?

piperider361 wrote:
What’s the difference between a prebottled wash such as Citadel or Vallejo, vs mixing a oil wash with mineral spirits?

For this specific project, I’m wanting to do the recessed lines on some Tau models a bright blue. I’ve done the recessed lines on Eldar with Citdel washes straight from the bottle and they seem to work fine - what extra benefit, if any, would I get from making an oil wash?

Prebottled washes tint whatever you are painting but also specificly pools in the recesses to make those areas darker.

though you can carefully apply it to not pool if you need to tint some spots.

oil washes are different process as you are varnishing the model first with gloss, the oil wash goes into the recesses as normal but then after it drys you use whatever solvent you used on a q tip and clean off the excess leaving the wash only in the spots you want it in.

piperider361 wrote:
What’s the difference between a prebottled wash such as Citadel or Vallejo, vs mixing a oil wash with mineral spirits?

For this specific project, I’m wanting to do the recessed lines on some Tau models a bright blue. I’ve done the recessed lines on Eldar with Citdel washes straight from the bottle and they seem to work fine - what extra benefit, if any, would I get from making an oil wash?

Main benefit of oil washes is the ability to tidy them up and a few other "post processing" effects.

Oil washes also for pin washes are vastly faster to apply as the heavily diluted paint is drawn along the lines by capillary action.

Downsides: Need to apply gloss varnish before applying, and they take a lot longer to dry
Upsides: they are cheap, if you don't like it you can remove it and start again

Oil wash for a bright colour though may not work so well given how much you dilute the paint, worth a try though.

Oil washes have other advantages when it comes to adding like thin tinting filters as they don't pool in the same way as acrylics.


Have used the technique on WW2 models often (basically spray green, varnish, oil wash, rub it cleaner, seal it, job done - doing it as a pinwash on a 40k model will need a bit of care and cleaning up.

Basically its just another way to get the same effect if all you want is a pin wash - a bright blue oil wash may work, but I think you would be better with thinned acrylic to get the colour density

There are two major differences:

1) Oil paints can be thinned without limit, and don't leave tide marks like acrylic washes. Acrylic paints start to break up and not work properly if you thin them too much, and the edge of the washed area usually has a distinct line where the wash ends. The oil paint method lets you get a more subtle effect if you want, especially on large flat surfaces like vehicles where an acrylic wash just makes a mess of it.

2) Oil paints take days, if not weeks, to dry completely. An acrylic wash will be dry within seconds to minutes, so there's very little time to adjust it if you don't like the result. But with oil paints you can put down a rough "sketch" of what you want, and then fine-tune it for hours if you need to. This makes blending a lot easier, and can save you from a catastrophic mistake if your brush slips or the wash pools too much. Of course this can also be a major downside, as handling the model as you paint it becomes very difficult and you have to be willing to put your project aside for a week or two any time you put oil paint on it.

In the context of panel lines the second benefit is the most important one. You don't have to be nearly as careful when applying the wash because you can just wipe off anything that spills outside the lines. But I'm not sure how well it's going to work with bright blue paint, diluting paint to make a wash and having bright colors are pretty incompatible ideas. And TBH I'm not sure why you'd want to do it in the first place, recessed lines should be a darker shade of the adjacent material, not bright colors.

 Peregrine wrote:
1) Oil paints can be thinned without limit, and don't leave tide marks like acrylic washes. Acrylic paints start to break up and not work properly if you thin them too much, and the edge of the washed area usually has a distinct line where the wash ends. The oil paint method lets you get a more subtle effect if you want, especially on large flat surfaces like vehicles where an acrylic wash just makes a mess of it.

If you use flow improvers and mediums to thin out acrylic washes you can make them pretty bloody thin on the pigment side and still have them function fine.

But yeah, oils have lower surface tension (thus spread better) and dry slow enough that you can manipulate them afterwards (either cleaning up bits or creating blends that are hard to impossible to achieve with acrylics).

Downside of oils being the slow drying time can be annoying, they tend to be more involved if you want to do them well and you typically use stronger solvents that smell bad,even the low odour ones smell somewhat (though you can use water mixable oil paints, they don't spread as nicely as regular oils but they can be thinned with certain acrylic thinners to avoid having to use strong solvents).

piperider361 wrote:
What’s the difference between a prebottled wash such as Citadel or Vallejo, vs mixing a oil wash with mineral spirits?

For this specific project, I’m wanting to do the recessed lines on some Tau models a bright blue. I’ve done the recessed lines on Eldar with Citdel washes straight from the bottle and they seem to work fine - what extra benefit, if any, would I get from making an oil wash?

I suggest using GW technical nihilokh oxide in the recess, it isn't exactly bright blue, but its subtle enough, once dry you can do recess highlights with a small brush for glow effects.

Bright colors in recesses might work. A while back I saw someone paint the runes on a wraithblade's shield using a white wash, to add a slight glow. It seemed to work fine in one coat.
What effect are you trying to achieve? Because as other said, panel lines on Tau models are usually painted darker.

Here's a general idea of what I'm trying to do.



It actually looked really good while "wet", but as it started to dry, a lot of the lines started to fade, like they didn't have pigment there or something...any ideas?

Another advantage of oil washes is that they retain their opacity and vibrance when dry.

piperider361 wrote:
Here's a general idea of what I'm trying to do.



It actually looked really good while "wet", but as it started to dry, a lot of the lines started to fade, like they didn't have pigment there or something...any ideas?

Use a long tip brush and dip into the settled pigment in the pot or shake it up or apply another layer, I prefer the first method, nickel oxide is flexible, you can use a slightly damp flat brush to go over any mess and whip away the mistakes when dry.