I Hate Chemistry

You know those times when you take something and mess with it, assuming that your messing will only improve it? I tried that and was almost tragically wrong.

I like using washes when I do my tabletop-quality miniatures. They're easy ways to blend highlights and create shadows in all the right places. However, I sometimes find the effect to be too much, so last week I tried to fix it.



Late one night I had a brilliant idea. I took a pot of my brown wash that was 1/4 full and an equal amount of distilled water. Surely adding water would only lessen the effect without somehow mutating the pigments into paint-ruining devils, right?

I was going through what I had left to do on the 15mm models in my head, and I had one of those oh no! moments. I grabbed one of my garbage models that I use for testing techniques, slapped different colors on it, and then hit it with my mad-science wash. Here are the annoying results:

First is the white gap between his helmet and back plate. That should be a very dark brown, but something has made the pigments turn chalky when they dry.

And here, you can make out a light purple/white reside on the inside of his elbow.

Granted, it would have been infinitely more dramatic to have the wash on my brush and stop mere millimeters away from the models. But alas, my heart gets to have a bit less strain this week and I didn't ruin my first 15mm paint job (pics coming when it's sealed and flocked).

Still, this wash debacle is a total mystery to me. What's interesting is that when it's wet, you can't see a difference. And in the time it was wet on the model, it looked like I'd succeeded in my goal of taming its effect. But why oh why is it trying to ruin my work?

So there wasn't much of a grand story or humiliating lesson here (thankfully!), but it does say a good deal about my knowledge of science and justifies my mild case of being a pack rat.

See you tomorrow for the giveaway!