Playing with dry pigments

I haven’t yet gotten around to writing the final day of my Masterclass posts, so you wouldn’t have read about my experiences with dry pigments. (It’s still on my todo list!) But there is a minor story that goes along with this post. These first two paragraphs are just preamble – head below the jump/line to read the interesting part. 🙂

I leave the class and immediately head to Secret Weapon Miniatures to purchase dry pigments. Out of all of the techniques we learned for vehicles, I felt like this one was the most accessible and the most generally useful for what I wanted to do – mess up some Ork trukks! Upon navigating to the web site I was presented with a staggering array of colour options…I tried to pick and choose the ones that I thought I’d need, only to order every colour they had. $100US and several weeks later, I have the pigments.

You also need a pigment fixer in order to ensure that the stuff stays adhered to the model. I was told that Burnaby Hobbies stocked it, so I went there…only to find that they had sold out. And apparently this stuff can’t be air mailed, so they weren’t expecting a shipment for some time. I asked a few people, did some research and randomly called Strategies on the off chance they had some…Darren told me that they had one bottle left, so I rushed over on my lunch break to grab it!

Head below the jump to read about the pigments, using them, what I liked, what I didn’t like and questions that I have!

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The use is easy – take the pigment with a brush, apply it to the model. When you’re done, take a soft brush and dip it very gently onto the model where the pigment is. The fixer will expand rapidly to cover a much larger area. Don’t brush the fixer on! You’ll move your pigment around and it will probably look wet instead of the dry look we want!

My first use was pretty terrible. I took a Yellow Earth and applied it in large clumpy parts on a single side of the Rhino and then fixed it there. When the fixer dried, it looked patchy and bad.

Next, I spread the clumps out until it looked like a dusty layer on top of the model. Over the next several hours (we were playing Apocalypse while I did this :P) I added another 3-4 layers of different colours to see what it would look like – Dark Earth and Green Earth in the shadows, and more Yellow Earth around the bottom. I added Exhaust Black to the areas where a cutting torch would have been used, and Violet on the tips of the exhaust pipes since the Imperial Armor Masterclass book loves purple as a “violently heated metal” look.

Here are some photos of where I ended.

This is still super easy to do, but there are a few things I don’t like and a few other things I wonder. If you’ve got answers, I would love to hear them!

• The pigment, when originally applied, looks dusty. I like it. After the fixer, it looks…well, you can see it. Less dusty and more something else. I think it’s seriously messy, and I don’t like it.
• The Secret Weapon site says to just apply the pigment and you’re done! Would it get rubbed off easily without the fixer?
• If you don’t put the fixer evenly across the model (ie, you’re just weathering a section), you get darker splotches in places.
• I wonder if dull coat would fix this.

What do you guys think?