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evening dakka,

I've heard mention of using an airbrush to apply washes, but I've yet to find a good explanation for the how and why of it. a quick search of youtube turned up several weathering vids, but nothing specifically about applying washes. anyone care to enlighten me?

cheers,

v

you would apply a wash to a model with an airbrush if you want to achieve a tint effect on a piece of armor or something. Say you think the armor should be a shade darker, spray on a black ink wash very lightly where you want it darker.

You can get the same effect by using very watered down paint.

I think its called a filter effect.

 varl wrote:
evening dakka,

I've heard mention of using an airbrush to apply washes, but I've yet to find a good explanation for the how and why of it. a quick search of youtube turned up several weathering vids, but nothing specifically about applying washes. anyone care to enlighten me?

cheers,

v

Easy, just put some of the wash in the airbrush cup and go to town! In all seriousness though, that is really all you need to do. You can thin them down as well depending how strong you need the color. The best use of washes in an airbrush is to tie a gradient together if the transition isn't as smooth as you wanted it. In this case you are using the wash as more of a glaze and it gives a nice effect.

Airbrush painters use lots of transparent paints, often reffered to as candy colours while doing custom cars and motorcycles. They allow you to underpaint shading in the base colours and then apply a coloured wash if you will to tint the whole lot whatever colour maintaining the previous shading work.

Citadel washes arent quite a candy colour, but you can do similar effects with them this way.
Spraying the wash makes it more like a glaze as you dont get more settling into recesses unless you spray really heavy and wet.

Edit;
To show what I'm talking about;

This painting I've got as wip, The base colour is black, solid black. And then I freehanded the wizard in Transparent White and Transparent Black building up layer upon layer as I went with a Blue wash then another layer of white then a blue wash, its not finished yet - about 10 layers so far, but I think you can see what I'm talking about.

ah, very interesting. so this would be far from the typical wash usage, then (e.g., shading the recesses on the model).

 Horst wrote:
you would apply a wash to a model with an airbrush if you want to achieve a tint effect on a piece of armor or something. Say you think the armor should be a shade darker, spray on a black ink wash very lightly where you want it darker.

You can get the same effect by using very watered down paint.

I think its called a filter effect.

QFT - although the term filter would be more appropriate when you apply the wash over a larger area, to blend the colors better together - say a blue filter over a layered area of blue, to soften the tones and hide the individual layers.

Cheers!

 varl wrote:
ah, very interesting. so this would be far from the typical wash usage, then (e.g., shading the recesses on the model).

Yeah you can achieve a huge variety of effects by layering different colours together in different ways. As has been said to soften a blend can be quite useful. Or like in my painting to create a blend with underpainting. I used Devlan mud sprayed onto some skaven clanrats once before and went a bit heavy and wet with too much pressure, it did actually give a similar effect to the typical brushing it on... I decided it was still good as it took 5minutes to wash 80 figures all over to a reasonable standard.

Rather than being used for one specific thing, Transparent paint in an airbrush opens up a world of techniques that weren't so easy with a hairy stick.

EPIC GANDALF

 xSoulgrinderx wrote:
EPIC GANDALF

Assuming you are talking about the wizard painting thanks! Not intended to be Gandalf exactly just a generic wizard, Bit of practise at freehand airbrush control. Its been sat there like that since roughly new years,so 8months! I feel like its not finished... but never seem to get around to it.
I'm not the best sprayer out there but I'm working at it. Am really happy that someone likes it!

I would not recommend overspraying for a wash effect. Using a brush to guide it into recesses is a better way to go about it. However, you can achieve a similar effect by masking the panels/raised areas and giving the recessed areas a darker shade. You don't always even need a mask, depending on your control.

Alternately, you can lighten the raised areas, which has the same practical effect.

I tried that last weekend. Works wonders as speed matters. Couple of issues :
- you cannot put the wash where you want it thicker as you would with a brush
- since the coat is uniform at first, is it affected by gravity a lot - that means if you overspray, wash will accumulate at the bottom of the surfaces.