 Hello everybody and welcome to another hobby cheating video and today we're going to talk about a better way to do sort of panel lining, pin washes, that kind of thing. And this is actually a trick that if you're a scale modeler there's no question you already know this. But I think for a lot of us who came into the miniature painting hobby through more traditional means, namely, you know, we learned on acrylic paints and stuff like that, we're generally afraid of or unfamiliar with I should say is probably the better word, with something like oil paints. And that's what we're going to use today. We're going to use a little oil wash. Now I've done a previous video on making an oil wash. I'll drop that down in the description. But we've made this oil wash right here, sorry, keep it in camera here. You can see it's very thin. And we've made this out of some Winton oil colors, specifically this is ivory black and cobalt violet hue, which is a nice dark purple color we'll get for our night here. And the advantage to, you know, let me say a couple of things about washes. In general, with a figure like this with panels on a massive machine like this where you've got all these big large flats, you never want to use a traditional wash, a traditional wash over a surface like this is just it's it's doing all the wrong things. It is the quickest way to get instantaneous coffee staining and to basically just ruin the look of a miniature. You want to avoid putting something thin like that, that's going to just coffee stain over your large flats. Okay, so that's what we've got here. We've got a ton of large flats and we're going to wash them in a better way. So what we did is we took 10, sorry, hit the camera there, 10 parts to one of our Mona Lisa odorless paint thinner. This is the the white spirits that I use. You can get this from Amazon and most hardware stores or hobby stores or stuff like that. It's around. It's commonly available. And like I said, then we used basically 10 to one that to these two colors. And what that gives us is a nice little slurry that looks like that. So let's get into it. We're going to grab a nice sharp synthetic brush. So this is not a this is not a sable brush. We don't want to use sable brushes on something like this. And we're going to have a nice grimy paper towel to wipe our our oil paint on just off camera here. In fact, I'm going to move it over to my side here. So I'm not going over the miniature. Traditional washes, traditional paints, acrylic paints, that is to say, what we're used to using are consists of three parts. Part one is the pigment that we use for color. Part two, you thought I was going to go to the middle finger. I did not. Part two is some kind of medium, some kind of binding agent. Okay. In the case of acrylic paint, that's acrylic in the case of oil paints. Various types of oil, et cetera. Alcohol based paints use alcohol. Namels use enamel. You get the idea here. They're named after their binding agent, right? And then the third type, just to pick a different weird finger is a solvent, right? And so in miniature paints, your solvent is water. Water has very strong cohesion, right? It wants to stick to itself. It wants to chemically bond and form these things. That's why you can do stuff like put a drop of water on a penny. You know, we all did that in school where you saw that you could make the little concave shape or convex shape, convex shape, whatever. You can make the little bubble of water on a penny, right? Oils on the other hand don't have that. The oil that makes up paint thinner is very, very, very, very, very low on that cohesion so it will naturally run very easily. By the way, that's why that's effectively what something like an additive like FlowAid does is it just really reduces that surface tension, that cohesion. So what we do is we take a nice big, take a nice dollop of that oil paint on there and we're just going to touch it right into our gap at a couple of points. And what you'll see is that it just runs to fill that space. Now we can also do something like touch the side of these shapes. And what happens is it'll just naturally flow right around the edge. So when you've got a bottom, like a bottom plate like this, these are classically murder to kind of go in an edge and then put a black line on. So with an oil paint, we can just come in and we can just touch it right to there. And you can see how that oil paint just spreads out. So we're just lightly touching it over and over again. Just touch, touch, touch. You notice I'm not actually painting it. I'm letting the oil do all the work for me, right? Now you'll notice I did varnish this a note on using this stuff. If you're going to put oil paint on a miniature, this was heavily varnished before I touched it. You will also notice that there's this sort of effect where you can see where the oil spread, where it gets all shiny. That will happen. It's not a big deal. You just need to wait till the oil dries and then you make sure to varnish the whole surface yet again. And that will bring everything back in line. But effectively, we can do both these edge lines really nicely. We just use gravity, right? So you notice I'll rotate the thing around here so that I'm always gaining the benefit here. I can just, on stuff like this where I'm going to paint over the top later, I can be a little messy. I can just kind of shove it in all those little spaces there. So it very quickly and easily lets me edge this whole thing. Any real effort, I'm not screwing up the rest of my work. All I'll have to do is wait for that to dry, which generally an oil wash being so thin, it will generally dry in about 24 hours, maybe a little quicker. So it's pretty fast. So it's a really fast, easy way. When it comes to a piece like this, this is one of those things that can just be so annoying to go and have to trace every freaking little panel. But instead, I can just touch if anything gets to where I don't want it. I can always just wipe it. That's the other advantage. Oil paints stay active for so long. If I happen to mess up and get something where I don't want it, no big deal. I can just come back later and touch it with a clean brush with just maybe a little bit of white spirits on it and boom, it'll pick it right up. So I can just work my way around all this. This is another good trick for, one of the things I always push people on is, I always say you've got to make sure you've got something on your rivets. This is a classic big deal for me. Things like rivets need to be well outlined and they shouldn't just be the same. They need like a shadow, they need to stand out in some way. And you know, you can do that with going around and touching every rivet with ink or something like that. And in general, you'll kind of get a pretty decent effect with that. But the other thing you can do with rivets is with an oil wash, it's very easy because we just go, I'll do it right here on the center, we just go, let me get a little bit less there, we just go touch, touch, touch, touch and I just very quickly touch every rivet and that's all there is to it. A pretty simple, pretty easy way to get all your panels and you can see the difference there where that went dark. Now again, that oil effect where you see the sort of stain around there, don't worry about that. Once everything dries and we re-varnish, we'd bring it right back in the line, so it's not a problem. Basically, I would give this 24 hours and then I would varnish over the whole thing and bada bing, bada bang, bada boom. Now I have all my dark lines nice and separated, but I haven't done anything else to the surrounding paint job. Just that easy. So that's it, it's a real simple, this is a fast one, it's real easy, but it's something that I wanted to share with everybody because it just makes this kind of a thing so much less intimidating, so much easier and you know, having these panels well separated on a machine like this just makes all the difference in the world. Your panels are going to look so much better when they have this kind of effect where there's a nice dark shadow in every panel. Again, this is something that scale modelers have done for absolutely years, I'm not telling them anything new, this is a trick they know well because this is a very well trod territory for them where you do some pin washing, you know, classically they would just literally call it pin washing because you would just touch around like little pins of paint and then you're good to go. So I'm going to keep working on this, obviously I'm not going to record the whole thing here, but you get the idea, you know, I can trace things like this pipe in the same way and just touch one side of the pipe and get the whole pipe done, just allow that to flow right along and it's nice because that capillary action of the oils is just going to be so much stronger for what I want to accomplish here than if I had to go through and try to very carefully trace all this with an ink and of course the problem is if I step out of line a little bit with an ink or a very thin paint and get it where I don't want it then what's going to happen is it's going to necessarily stain the stuff because it's not workable for the same amount of time whereas here it's just keep working my way around, working my way around, touching all the little panels, touch all the little rivets, you know, it's still a somewhat of a time-consuming process, I mean, it's not, it's still not instantaneous, right? But, I mean, come on, this is a lot faster and that's what we like, getting the same or better effect with less effort and less time, hey, that's the definition of hobby cheating, so there you go, that's doing your panel lining with oils, you can see how that's coming along there, nice dark lines everywhere, so got plenty more to do but if you liked that give it a like, subscribe for additional hobby cheating in the future, we have new videos here every Saturday, if you have a suggestion for a video you'd like to see, go ahead and drop that down in the comments, always happy to see viewer requests, if you, if you have any questions, of course you can always drop those down there as well, always try to answer every question but as always I very much appreciate you watching this one and we'll see you next time, bye bye!