Paint help, please...

[Guest]

I've done more experimenting, and found the root of my problem - not using the right thinner. I had been thinning my acrylic with water first (very bad - because it beads on an enamel base) and then windex, which stopped the beading, but I think was drying way too fast, and not wiping off the flat areas as well. I tried a whole lot of different methods on test pieces, and as soon as I used the right thinner for the acrylic wash, it went on much better, and wiped off much better too, even with the matt base coat and no gloss coat between. The acrylic gloss with an enamel wash is something that I am keen to try in the future, when I get some acrylic gloss, but I'm getting good results for what I need in my current project. I also noticed that while my turps was just stripping the enamel base coat right off again, the enamel thinner is much milder. It will still strip an enamel gloss coat, but much more slowly, and requires a bit of rubbing.


Anyway, time to strip back some major parts of my model and give it another go. I could maybe get away with painting on top of what's there, but that's going to give me a lot of layers of paint, and maybe not so good a result.


Thanks for your help - I've certainly learned a lot!

[Guest]

Thanks again for all your help. I've completed the model, and posted some photos here...

http://www.scale-models.co.uk/threads/star-destroyer.31543/

In the end, I acrylic gloss coated under the wash coat, and then spent a lot of time cleaning the wash coat off as best I could. The base coat did still come off in a few places, so I did have to touch-up the base coat again, but not too much. It is such a detailed model, that what I wanted in the end was just a tiny amount of wash coat left to pop the details without making it look too dirty. The final result is combination of all the different methods on top of each other.


The matt clear was nowhere near as matt as the matt paint - more like a satin clear really, almost gloss in places, and very variable, but I've accepted it and moved on. It's time to forget the details, sit back, and enjoy the finished model.