I made another naiskos.
Firstly, it was a reminder of why I never made any more. Good god, it’s laborious. All told, it takes about two weeks of calendar time and truly countless hours of casting and weathering time, especially since you have to do the tops and bottoms of all the pieces as separate steps.
But secondly, and the reason, I’m posting, is that I refined my process a bit.
Here is the new strategy.
- Thickly apply Liquitex modeling paste slightly tinted with terre verte hue and titan buff, patting it with gloves to give little peaks of texture.
- Allow to dry for about an hour and then with a wet finger smooth over the peaks, leaving some texture for pigments to accumulate in but a texture that looks gentle and weathered down with time.
- Apply a heavily diluted wash of terre verte hue to green up the naiskos considerably. Remove most of this by patting with a shop towel.
- Apply little drops sepia color in high-flow acrylic into corners that look like they would accumulate dirt over the years, wet down a bit to drip into crevices. Wipe away with a dry cloth as best as you can (which will always be imperfect, which is exactly what we want).
- Mix up a batch of titan buff and warm the color up a bit with several drops of high-flow yellow oxide. This gives you a nice warm wash to wipe into the naiskos and control the final overall color. If you want it warmer, wipe away less with a shop towel. If you want it greener and cooler, wipe away more. I found that without this last warm wash, the naiskoses tend to look a little ashen.
- Apply 2K automotive urethane clear coat in matte finish. This helps keep the top and bottom halves from sticking to each other as they tend to do with an acrylic clear coat for the first several weeks after finishing.
Same thing applies to the little guys, except for Step 1, since their features would get lost in the modeling paste.
Here are a few examples of the “wet wash” approach:
Here is what it looks like before the wash. Notice the nice base of sepia in the deep cracks. This is very credible looking aging, but it’s a bit much on its own. The lighter wash on top softens it up and makes it look much more legit.
