Pinwash 🤯

My friends, yesterday I started with the pin washing stage, but the oils were taking their time while they were draining on a cardboard palette, so in the meantime I painted a bunch of details - and as usual, all of them are grey 😁 (pardon the photos, the phone camera is starting to go all coocoo from the different colors and contrasts). 

It took me a while to choose which paints to use, I ended up with Industrial Earth for the dark shadows over brown and green parts, and Raw Umber on the yellow areas. I'd like to show the "choosing process" in the video and talk about it for a bit, but what's more important... I betrayed my original decision! Even though I post-shaded the Zimmerit believing it would suffice, a few accidental spills on the surface showed me that adding a very subtle pin wash into the pattern would make it look more interesting. 

Here it's important to keep it very subtle, and I still think not every Zimmerit pattern is ideal for this. The traditional ridged pattern such as on the Tiger has enough depth that it casts its own shadows, but something flat like this can seriously benefit from a careful wash application. Time will tell if it was indeed a good choice, but when I imagined the various dust and earth tones seeping into the pattern, I think the result will look just right in the end, but again, we'll see. If nothing else, someone had to try it! 

My greatest concern was it would darken the model, but that didn't happen at all. Working with oil paints is such a pleasure-inducing task I got completely lost in the process and enjoyed every seam and crevice 😁Now that I've got the pin washes finished and most of the steel details painted in a grey color, I can proceed to rust tones. And that also includes painting the exposed steel areas where tool mounts were ripped off their welds 😁