Hi Folks,
I've just recently come back to modeling after a 20 year hiatus (kids, wife, house, etc) and now that I actually have a few bucks to spend on the hobby I'm looking at what I wish I learned when I was a teenager. Today's lesson: how to paint with washes.
Are there any good tutorials out there on the web? I've been an arm chair enthusiast of FSM for years and I see all of these brilliant examples of washes (I'm sure I missed the editions that dealt with washes). Here's a good example: Page 30 of FSM 2/2010. I love Mr. Leszczynski's cockpit paint job. I would love to be able to do something similar with my 1/48 Tamiya F16 but I just don't know how. The few examples I have seen leave me with even more questions.
Here are some general questions off the top of my head relating to washes:
1. I see you can buy washes. But I have also read where you can make your own by just diluting. Why would I want to buy washes?
2. What color should you use as a wash? Is it based on the color that your using as your base or do you always use black?
3. Besides practice (and a lot of bad paint jobs in the process) is there a youtube video that actually shows the practice of washing and how it should look when you're doing it?
And on another subject - seriously, how does anyone paint anything this small and keep a straight line? I'm complaining at the 1/48 scale I can't imagine it at 1/72. I've already tried painting by hand some of the instrument panels on my F16 and my paint goes everywhere. I'm using a decent head-mounted magnifying glass but trying to stay on the raised surface of a square that measures 1mm x 2mm is tough. I can't imagine a mask that small either.
Sorry about being all over the map here - thanks in advance!