At last I got a rematch against my most hated enemy: varnish!
Some of you may recall that several mishaps with varnishing caused the last wave of models for Da Ironbullz to appear milky, opaque, and desaturated.
There is nothing more disheartening than a simple coat of varnish wiping out all of your hard work carefully painting a model! So this time around, I promised myself I would get my varnishing strategies sorted out before sealing any new models.
Conveniently, I recently finished painting seven more Slugga Boyz, which provided the perfect opportunity to do some A/B testing.
I had previously been using Liquitex varnish, which several hobby sites recommended online and seemed to work reasonably well, but I picked up some Vallejo varnish as a point of comparison.
I varnished six of the Slugga Boyz with different combinations of gloss and matte varnish, as follows:
| Model | Gloss Coat | Matte Coat |
|---|---|---|
| A | Liquitex | Liquitex |
| B | Vallejo | Vallejo |
| C | Liquitex | Vallejo |
| D | Vallejo | Liquitex |
| E | Diluted Liquitex (cut 2:1 with varnish:water) | Diluted Liquitex (cut 2:1 with varnish:water) |
| F | Diluted Vallejo (cut 2:1 with varnish:water) | Diluted vallejo (cut 2:1 with varnish:water) |
After letting the varnish dry for several days, I came back and ranked the models based on their appearance. My main objectives were that (1) the top coat wasn't too opaque, (2) the colors on the model weren't too desaturated, and (3) the overall finish was matte with no gloss creeping through the top coat.
Here are the results, ranked from best (left) to worst (right):
Some takeaways from this experiment are:
Based on these experiments, it seems like the optimal finishing strategy going forward should be:
I still need to whip up some bases for these boyz, but for now here's a picture of the fully painted mob!
Hoping to be back soon with another update on bases for these models and progress on painting up some Meganobz.