Despite the availability of washes, I'm still a fan of using inks on my miniatures. In the picture, you can see the results of applying a goblin green basecoat to an ork boy's exposed flesh followed by the green ink. The results can be seen. The ink does a great job at getting in to the recesses and darkening the miniature. As I'm slowly using up my remaining citadel ink pots, I'm mixing up some of my own by diluting my darker colours with with equal parts of water (or less). After the inking layer, I'm still applying a highlight colour or two (or more), followed by a wash to bring everything together. This is because washes are excellent at blending lots of different tones in to a smooth transition that retains the highlights and lowlights very well. It'd take many layers of washes to achieve the same effect as inking (or moderately diluted darker colours), and so that is why I'm still using them to this day. 
Saturday, October 16, 2010
Why I still use Inks
Despite the availability of washes, I'm still a fan of using inks on my miniatures. In the picture, you can see the results of applying a goblin green basecoat to an ork boy's exposed flesh followed by the green ink. The results can be seen. The ink does a great job at getting in to the recesses and darkening the miniature. As I'm slowly using up my remaining citadel ink pots, I'm mixing up some of my own by diluting my darker colours with with equal parts of water (or less). After the inking layer, I'm still applying a highlight colour or two (or more), followed by a wash to bring everything together. This is because washes are excellent at blending lots of different tones in to a smooth transition that retains the highlights and lowlights very well. It'd take many layers of washes to achieve the same effect as inking (or moderately diluted darker colours), and so that is why I'm still using them to this day. 
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4 comments:
You might want to look into the P3 paint line, they have inks that I'm finding are very excellent.
Hi Elbrun -- thanks for the tip about the P3 line!!
Do you not find that inks leave too much of a shine?
Hi Dave -- You are right: they can leave a significant amount of shine.
Watering them down helps somewhat. But on some miniatures (e.g. plaguebearers of Nurgle) the shine can actually help make it look much better.
If I'm only using the inks for getting in to the cracks, they're not too bad.
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