Steady as She Goes

Brace for Impact, Baton Down the Hatches, Prepare to Repel Borders and other such phrases for after many weeks of abject failure to do so I have FINALLY applied paint to a figure :)

Not much I'll grant you but SOME at least and while I was at it I've tried out a couple of GW's latest water based offerings on a couple of Spartan's water based offerings.

Continuing the rather tenuous theme I was in Bluewater over the weekend and dropped into GW to have a chat about and pick up a couple of the new paints for this specific purpose. The guys in there were happy to chat and set me up to have a go with the base layer white and also the new dry compounds.

Two quick coats of base white went over black impressively well though I was less impressed with the dry compound as my Boy in Blue still had to wipe most of his load (ahem!) off the brush which seemed self defeating.

Making my excuses I quickly picked up a couple of seemingly relevant bases and layers along with a blue and purple / violet shade and disappeared off with the missus before I let on TOO MUCH! (no need for me to explain I'm sure)

So over Saturday evening I sprayed my frigates and subs white and applied a liberal coat of Drakenhof Nightshade and watched with interest. Initial coverage seemed pretty good but coming back Sunday I was disappointed that some of the finer detail hadn't been filled at all.

Going back over these little voids the neat shade seemed to have a little too much surface tension for the task at hand so a touch of water was called for. To be honest, I'm not entirely sure that it should have been :/

Steaming along last night (apologies, couldn't resist) I drybrushed up through a couple of blue-grays before flattening out and finishing off with a drybrush of base white, Ceramite White. That I was far more impressed with as it gave a good solid colour very easily.

For context I've basecoated in a light wooden deck and the tricholore funnels that I wanted to try out. Fairly happy so far, just need to sort out remaining detail and get on a bit of magic Devlan Mud to some areas at least.

Still not sure quite how WHITE I want the hulls and superstructure to but one thing at a time. Slowly, slowly, catchy surrender-monkey :)