Adventures in oil and clay

Today I have delved into two new areas for me: the use of oil paints in miniature painting, and trying to make my own terrain. That's a lie actually there's far more than two new things but I think I can group huffing turpentine, getting oil paint in my eye, getting oil paint out of my eye, trying to use a camera with slippy clay hands, squidging the lump of clay too hard and shooting it into my other eye, and accidentally drinking my clay water into the above two activities.

Because it was the first time I was doing it, and they both turned out to be a bit messy I didn't manage to get any proper WIP pictures. It was a good first excursion though and I'll definitely be doing them again in the future so I will get a proper post up about them in the future! For now here's what I got;

 

 Here's the little splodges of oil paint I used. If you check my previous post I list the paint set I actually bought. I didn't use many colours to try and keep it simple. I really wasn't feeling confident about doing this for the first time! This is a technique used by more traditional military modellers to heavily weather vehicles or add more subtle layers to the colour of a vehicle. Get it right and with the oil paints you do something in half an hour that would take hours to do with acrylics. I don't get it quite right, but I didn't set anything on fire either. 

I used a stiff synthetic brush to dot different colours onto the base of my Bling Tank, now my official test model for crazy new things. I think I used alittle too much paint per dot / on the area. 

Looks like a clown tank.Grit your teeth and carry on. 

Then I dipped my flat wide brush into my sansador (odorless turpentine) and removed the excess on a papertowel. Using long strokes going in the same direction I smeared the paint everywhere.

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I just kept brushing and occasionally cleaning my brush off to take away some of the excess paint. After a while I would clean my brush, take a swipe, wipe it off, repeat. I really put too many splodges on! The wonderful thing about oils is that they have very long working times. I have some oil on my palette that has been there for over a day and it's still usable. Much nicer than acrylics that dry the moment they leave the bottle!

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Here's the tank when I had finished my first adventure in oils. I need to take a decent picture during the day because it's made a nice textured, coloured difference. This photo just shows that the tank is still mostly blue!

I have decided to roll my clay-update into my next post because I've done alot more work on it.