Ork Battlewagon: Experimenting with Masking, Salt Weathering and Oil Washes (Part 2)

Part 2 of the Ork Battlewagon experiment comes a bit late, but that’s because I had some problems with the techniques. I guess that’ll teach me to experiment with so many things at the same time.

First up, I don’t think I should have airbrushed so many colours on the same piece. I needed brown metals (rust), then blue, then yellow. Add in masking and salt weathering and that’s a lot of things that can go wrong at the same time. For example, you can see that the salt weathering I used for rust gets in the way of the masking that I wanted to do for the yellow stripe.

Which leads to some blurriness in the mask effect.

An issue that also applies to the ‘big jaw’ front bumper of the battlewagon.

I feel that I should have just done either a masking or a salt weathering, not both. But a little bit of touch ups and finishing in the metals and it still looked pretty ok. I was ready with the next step of the painting.

Or should I say the next mis-step. Oil washing is recommended after gloss varnishing your models, and then using oil solvents mixed with oils to make a nice rich wash. After which the oil wash is cleaned up with cotten buds and varnished a second time.

Me being the silly ‘what’s the worse that could happen’ sort of guy, made two mistakes, which I feel led to A WHOLE WORLD OF HEARTACHE. First, no gloss varnish coat prior to the wash. Second, the attempt to use other sorts of solvents for my oil wash. I couldn’t get easy access to oil solvents so I thought I could cheat with lighter fluid or turpentine. Oh man was I wrong. The lighter fluid dried SO QUICKLY it was more or less solid by the time I put it down. Add to that the matt surface of the battlewagon (because of the no gloss varnish) and the wash kind of just pooled there rather than wicking into the recesses.

Which turned my tires from metal…

To black. I mean I know Orks are dirty but this is just too much! I also had the same problem with the rest of the Battlewagon. 🙁

I eventually cleaned it all up, but I think with the mistakes the new techniques seemed more like a step back than a step forward towards time and effort saving. And because of that I got burnt out with the model. There’s some details that I could have gussied up but I really just wanted to see this paintjob finished so I left it with (for me) the bare minimum.

I guess it still came out ok, but I’m really afraid to try oil washes again. Maybe with a cleaner model, like tau or marines….