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Tuesday, June 13, 2023

Stiletto

Another murdermobile for Car Wars. This time around I tried drybrushing a lighter shade of purple over my original dark purple basecoat to provide a little more realism, but unfortunately I once again failed to get enough ink off my drybrush to properly execute the effect. However, it looks good enough for the table. 
 

3 comments:

Jeff Shyluk said...

It looks like you have a lot of paint on your dry brush, rather than too little, but there are different drybrush techniques. It takes much practice to get the brush just right.

When I dry-brush, there's just a tiny amount on the bristles. When I apply the paint, it goes on so light you have to look hard to see if it's even there. I repeat this over and over in the same spot. Eventually, it builds up. Acrylic, half-dry, is sort of sticky like tacky glue. You can pull the build-up around with the dry brush and it forms a gradient as you pull. At that point, you don't need to add more paint and instead you are just spreading around what you have. It dries quickly because it's so thin, so the brushwork is brief.

You can dry-brush with more paint on the bristles, but too much and you are just using a wet-brush technique that dries out quickly. Using more paint gives you a more variable and rough effect, but is harder to control, or put another way, it takes a great deal more practice than using a very dry dry brush.

Although you use very different media, perhaps the brush strokes in Japanese sumi-e artwork might give you greater guidance on how to approach your painting. Since your "canvas" is both tiny and three dimensional, you face hazards other artists like me avoid.

Earl J. Woods said...

Great technique advice in paragraph two! I'll try that.

Jeff Shyluk said...

Don't be surprised if it takes a number of tries. At some point, you'll discover the ideal amount of paint to be on your brush, and then after that it all falls together.

I keep a scrap piece of paper on hand to make test strokes and mostly to remove excess paint. You'll see on the paper when the dry-brush is close to being right.