Rust, and the pursuit therein!

Ooga chukka ooga chukka ooga ooga ooga chukka..

No idea why this song comes into my mind while looking at this photo.. but it does! But enough about the songs.. this is more about the rust and the applications of it.

So I spoke about it a bit, and how I received the first bottle, in my last post about Salute. But now I wanted to give the product a proper go at it. Though of course I say this, and do my tests, and then Roman over at Massive Voodoo posts up his own tutorials after I do my applications ... oh well such is life.. but just know that I did these tests BEFORE reading his article :)

So yeah.. the beginning portion.. and to find an appropriate test piece to try it on! Well, actually test piece was easy to find. I have had this Forged Monkey sculpt since the first beginners paint class with Roman back in March of 2013.

And the start of painting..

Seeing as the guy who sold it to me ( cool guy btw ) was doing it on a dark surface, I figured I would start on a dark surface. So I primed the piece in black, and misted it with grey. Seems normal enough right?

This is what it looked like after applying a few thick layers of the normal rust on it. And then I waited.. but I was very very impatient with this stuff. And began adding more and more and more... and well... not the best idea really.

I did give it a bit more time to air out and dry?... and this is what happened soon afterwards..

Top right was added with some water to try to make it have some cool effects.. but it just washed itself out a bit more.

So first tests.. not so successful really.. I mean there were some really nice effects from it, but not as bright or thick as I was hoping. And the stipple styling was not coming out as nice as I had hoped.

What do we do in this scenario though? We just re-prime it and try this again!

This time we went heavy grey. And you can see some of the build up from the previous experiments and layers.. but that is fine. Gives the piece some character.. I hope!

But I can say that this time I played with the colors bit by bit and thinned it down before applying it to the model. Just to see what effects that would have.

Immediately I can see the colors and styles that I was looking for.. and DAMMMMMN... The brighter sections is the Yellow Rust, the mid-tones are the Normal, and the darker sections coming from the Copper. Honestly this made me hooked on this product ... immediately!!!!

Played around with a bit more yellow on the edges to give it some more style.. and variation.

And with those tests proving successful.. I then wanted to try something else with it. How well it would do with chipping medium placed on top of it!

So I gave the piece a nice spray of AK Interactives ( pre split with mig ) chipping fluid, which made everything a bit shiny and glossy. But I was in full on test mode, so no turning back now!

Once the chipping layer was dry ( thank you hair dryer! ) I applied some blues to the model as a base color to test with. More in thinking of the color wheel and contrasting colors.. but also cause I really like my blue paints from Andrea and was hoping this would turn out cool.

Still really thick paint in places.. but again not surprising considering how thick I was applying colors before this and how many layers are on the pieces at this point. But onwards!!!!!

With the chipping medium between the rust and the colors.. I just did what it says the jar.. wet a brush and scrub away the top layer of paint! So.. that is what I did.. and this is the result!

The mixture of chipping medium, paint, and water seemed to take a lot of the color out of the main part of the rust. Not something that I was happy with.. but not the end of the world either.

So with that in mind, I took some of the rust ( normal ) and reapplied it in places..

And it began to get a bit darker and more in line to what I was hoping for. So I played with it a bit more, and began to add it and the other ones in other places. Like the edges and where I think rust would form... not that I know anything about where rust will form or even bothered to look at reference photos.. I mean I was having too much fun tossing rust at this piece!

And it really began to come alive at this point! And the more I waited the more the colors began to shift as they dried further.

At this point I figured I may as well just finish off the piece then and paint the eyes.

Since I was already in a testing mood, I just took out some Forged Monkey red pigments and played around with them a bit.

Normally I would go on about how this is the end of the tests.. that I really liked it.. and that it has great applications but that I still need to try it out some more.. blah blah blah...

Well I have more to show on how it looks on the wood sections, but I will put that into a second article for tomorrow!!!! In the meantime, let me know in the comments what you think of the end results and if it looks good or not! Cheers.