Testing Out Wet Blending

After years of difficulty in understanding wet blending, or feathering as the 'Eavy Metal team put it years ago in white dwarf, I found a tutorial by Ron Saikowski. His tutorial hit me like a brick; it suddenly made sense. I would have never thought of painting the base and while keeping it wet blending the two paints on the model right there. For some reason, I thought it was some weird way of line-highlighting, then while that was wet, feathering it down onto the dry object.

Wet blending on the white skirt of the Farseer's robes.

This was my first attempt at some wet blending. I took some GW Space Wolves Grey and base coated the skirt of his robes, then while it was still wet. I highlighted them with some Vallejo GC Blanche White and feathered it down into the shadows. I think I may go all the way down to a darker gray like GW Shadow Grey but I'm not quite sure how white I want the robes to be. The rest of the model is still a work in progress though...

I was so excited after testing it I wanted to do some further testing, but as the Space Wolves Grey was drying out so quickly on my Farseer, I thought I'd like to pick up an extender and see how those work. My wife and I then went to our local crafts store, Michael's, and found some Americana Extender for I think less than $2. I also convinced her to let me buy a bunch of other colors as I didn't like some of the consistency of the Vallejo paints I had purchased in the last few months.

Eldar War Walker test model

This Eldar War Walker is sort of my test model for a few techniques I'm trying out on my vehicles, not sure what I wanted to do at first. I primed the model with some gray Krylon primer, then basecoated the model in Vallejo GC Jade Green. I then washed it with GW Badab Black. On the left leg, I followed the wash by layered highlights of the base color again. I wasn't to happy with the results on this guy. It worked out great on my guardians but I wasn't too fond of this on the war walker.

Wet blending on lower right leg.

On this leg, well actually the bottom portion of it, I re-based it with some Folk-Art Green Forest with some of the extender added in. I then highlighted the leg with the Vallejo GC Jade Green and mixed it into the green forest and am quite exited of the results.

Close up.

I definitely think I'll be doing wet blending on a lot of things now that I've finally figured out the basics of it.