RE: KV Paint job

As Allen already mentioned, you have it wrong. Personally, I _do_ thin
my paint before dry brushing, and then use tissue or old (clean) denim
to soak up the paint until I can't see any come off the brush onto the
denim. Then I apply light strokes. I do use a rather large brush (1 or
bigger). The reason I like to thin the paint first is so that the
dry brushing does not produce a grainy surface.

Washes are one thing that takes a while to learn to do well (unless you
have someone show you). One thing that I did for a long time was to
try to apply too much at once. If you have too much on the brush, you
have a very ugly result. What happens is that the ink (or thinned paint)
moves to the outside of the wet area and then dries before the solvent,
leaving an ugly ring of colour. What you want to do is to use about the
same amount of fluid in the brush as you have when painting a thin coat,
but that fluid should be very thin.

What I did after much frustration and poor results was to paint an
entire
25mm figure using inks on a white base coat. This gave me a much better
feel for the ink and how it flows and dries. It was a very cool
experiment
that turned out to one of my better paint jobs. It was very slow,
though.
Black took something like 12 coats, with at least an hour of drying
between each one. The only parts that needed acrylics were the exposed
metal details. Maybe I'll try scanning it at work tomorrow.

>Drybrushing: I have tried this, but failed utterly. I guess that I have
too
>heavy a hand or use too thick of paints (even if I thin them
substantially).
>
>Washes: I do even worse with washes.
>
>I did plan one more detail to add. I have some blue ink wash that I
planned
>to pick out the panels with. The idea is to add a UV-ish cast to the
colors.
>I will try it tonight or tommorow and let you know the results (it
won't
>show up on a .jpeg if I do it right).
>

I have used a similar effect, but instead of using a blue ink I painted
the
area black and then dry brushed with very dark blue. If you plan to do
it
over lighter colours, then I recommend adding a small amount of blue
to whatever colour you are painting over and then dry brushing with the
mix.
Pick the shade of blue so that it will make the mixed colour lighter
than
the original colour and you can save yourself an extra step.

Hope this helps,
Tony C.