Day whatever in the diorama building house

Soooo, this regular posting I was going to do whilst doing this diorama seems to have gone out the window!

I have been working on it pretty much every single evening and trying some new techniques... I even bought myself another airbrush for the heady cost of... £20. It's become my new staple airbrush now. Its a simple dual action gravity feed airbrush, no adjustments can be made to it, so it's free of all the usual baggage and weight. I simply control air pressure with my air valve (connects the airbrush onto the hose) and amount of paint by how far I pull my finger back.

It looks a little like this, but with a smaller capacity paint chamber (about 2cc I believe) and a red housing at the back.

So onto my diorama stuff. In the image attached the tauros venator is almost complete, I need to just add pigments and oil effects.

I'm quite pleased with where I'm at, I tried applying rust staining with acrylics. This worked much better than expected, normally I would use enamel and oil paints for this as they can be feathered and adjusted with thinners easily. With the acrylics I added a whole bunch of drying retarder to the paint, this enabled me to do similar as I would previously, but create the feathering and effects with just water! Always a bonus.

I also applied a heat damage style effect to the lascannon muzzle. I tried this before with my valkyries, but it failed. I could never work out why... until last night when it all worked, due to the lascannon muzzles being matt this time and gloss previously.

To explain a little further, the technique is achieved by airbrushing layers of inks (red, purple, blue and black - in that order) to achieve a banded spectrum look about it... similar to how a stainless steel exhaust looks on a motorbike. The reason it failed before was I tried applying the ink onto a gloss surface and it immediately beaded away from the surface. This time as the surface was matt, it stayed in control and where i placed it.

So onto to tonight when I'm going to stay priming the models that are going on the base, I should also have mentioned I've changed the theme from roadside checkpoint to roadside IED.

Thanks and feel free to ask away :D