Good Wet Mud Effect - Easy and Cheap

That looks pretty darn good! Quite realistic for heavy mud!

Interesting. I'm working on a BRDM-3 right now and was thinking of doing a muddy scene for it. $15 is right up my alley.

OK: here's the $15 - more or less. If you don't have an art store around - Blick and Utrecht are large chains and are in most big cities - and employ very skilled staff -  Dickblick.com is Blick's excellent website with excellent selection and very good prices. (There's also a lot of information on Blick. The Golden website is a gold mine for complex painting techniques. No modeling site comes close.) The gels cost about $7.50 for about 8 ounces - enough to weather an armored division. Depending upon the brand, textured gels use pumice or lava. (Do check the video up above - you'll get the idea.) You want a bottle of either gloss, satin or matte medium to thin the gel and give it the desired place on the gloss-matte spectrum.  (Don't get something called only varnish - that can be a specialty product made for sealing a work and not really intended mixing. Liquitex sells gloss varnish and medium - that's okay. A medium is thin and white but dries clear.) Textured gels are sold by Liquitex, Golden and Windsor/Newton Galeria - all of them are fine. I'd guess that Pledge would work for a gloss/satin medium - I'd be careful with lacquer products like Tamiya clear base. But all of the same companies sell mediums - Blick's house brand (gloss, matte, satin) are the least expensive: about $6 for 8 ounces. Golden's equivalents are a couple dollars more. All the companies make them. (Some of the really ritzy brands like Sennelier or Holbein would be overkill, but even that would be less per ounce than anything from MIG. The best painters in the world use that stuff. While you're at it if you use dry pigments you might check those offered companies like Gamblin (US) or the even pricier Windsor or Sennslier: they are incredibly fine and run from $7 - $30 for about 4 ounces: the really expensive pigments would be pointless on a model.) You could color the stuff with any water based acrylic paint you might have, but better would be a tube of student grade artist acrylics. You can get a set of ten colors (10ml tubes - the same as Abteilung oils) for $7. "Student Grade" products from Windsor Newton Galeria, Blick's house brand, or Liquitex all would work fine - about $4 for a tube that will last a very long time. The one thing you want to avoid is using a lot of water. The agent in all this stuff is acrylic polymer and too much water will break down the product and greatly decrease its quality. A little is okay. And you clean the stuff with water or windex - one thing nice about it is that it's non-toxic etc. No smell. I don't miss it. (I would not mix any of this stuff with solvent based paints like Tamiya: they should be called lacquers and are a different animal. Actually, Tamiya might work perfectly well for coloring polymer mud - I've just had odd things happen when mixing radically different products.)

If any of this works out, you might want to check using Golden Fluid Acrylics for painting models - I use them all the time and for some purposes they are trumps - you just have to know how to use them. If you've had any experience with Vallejo Model Color or Citadel you're in the ball park. They work very well with an airbrush with a little TLC and greatly reduce tip clog. These polymer agent paints are not something you want to dry in your airbrush - they clean very easily when damp, but expect to strip the brush if you forget to clean it and the stuff dries. Drop me a note if you like.  

Ebergerud, On a couple builds where I wanted some heavy mud, Ive used Mig Mud that comes premixed and a little course but the colors are limited (just 2 that I know of). I tried a little on this Stryker but your tip makes a lot of sense and a lot cheaper too... I like the idea of using oils to change colors, something that Mig doesn't offer. Thanks.

I used thick artist acrylics to cut the gel. I can't think of a single advantage an oil paint would have for something like mud - people use it for dot fading and washes because it dries slowly, a potential advantage. A quality paint from a company like Windsor or Holbein uses the same pigment in both acrylics and oils - it's only the medium that changes. And the medium in a thick artist acrylic is a thick polymer - a lot like the mud you're making. But if oils would work well for making mud however it's done, let us know. I haven't tried it.

PS: I've continued to futz with the basic mixture above varying the colors and viscosity. The other efforts were not as successful as the first for wet mud. However, I made a brew with matte medium and then over painted it with Ranger “Distress Crackle Paint” to see whether something like this might not work for thick dried mud. Keep in mind these are one-off medical experiments and could presumably be improved with some effort. (I would certainly not have put as much on for dry mud.) But the crackle stuff does crackle the surface okay, and evokes memories of my times in Minnesota where a pounding rain could turn an area into a swamp and the following 99 degree sun dries it out – and it's crackled. Think I'll make another post and see if we can't confuse some more people.

Forgot to note - very nice build on the Stryker. And I was certainly not arguing that MIG products aren't good. They're a little pricey but I'm sure many modelers if not most are happy to let the MIG or AK gurus do the futzing for them. But MIG (and AK) have their roots in Vallejo and Vallejo is a major producer of artist acrylics. As I understand it, their Model Color line was produced because they saw a nice market for a slightly altered version of their fluid artist acrylics. So I'd think a lot of their products could be reverse engineered if, like me, you have fun messing around. (I forgot to mention that Valljo just put out a "crackle paint" for whatever Model Color/Air costs.)

Eric

Eric I am going to experiment with your technique, I think it has real promise. I especially like the first set of pics that shows a slight color mix and wet look, a real world scenario. The dried cracked look would be outstanding for a resting  AFV or military vehicle in a Dio.

EBergerud

 And the medium in a thick artist acrylic is a thick polymer - a lot like the mud you're making.

Now that is a cool, simple idea.  I used to AB artists acrylics, and still have some laying around.  I'll bet their viscosity could work out for thick mud.

Interesting discussion, and appreciate the OP starting the thread.

I've made mud with glue and baking soda.

What the glue/baking soda % mix?

Your mud looks very realistic and way cheaper too, just like mixing your own washes with gum turpentine and artists oils. Why put money in their pockets when you can make your own brew at a fraction of their price.

Gymbo-59

What the glue/baking soda % mix?

I just eye balled it. Kept adding one or the other until I got the thickness I wanted. About like gooey oatmeal so that it would stick where I placed it. I know this isn't very scientific but its what I successfully did.