Ian's Final Hobby Update of 2024
The Event
In November, Jason and I hosted the fifth Inquisitorial Conclave Invitational (shortened to the ICI in our gaming group), which was the biggest, most complicated narrative event either of us had run to date. This took up a ton of time and I’ll be posting in-depth pieces on it in 2025, but for now I’ll talk about the general hobbyings that led up to it.
The Great Washening Disaster of 2024
You may recall from my previous hobby update that I was pumping out terrain for the ICI, but it was all lacking an oil wash. The last piece of this terrain puzzle was my Zone Mortalis board, a full 4’ x 4’ table of the Necromunda ZM and 40k Boarding Action. This was basecoated with rattlecans, starting with Vallejo Gunmetal for the floors and Boarding Action walls, and then doing base of a Vallejo brown on the walls, followed by a zenithal spray of a beige. I then went in (with some help from friends) and painted the details on the Boarding Action walls, picking out some parts in bronze, green for screens, and beige for skulls. Finally, I sponged on various browns for rust and weathering.
The table looked good, but definitely was missing the final step: an oil bath. Add it to the pile.
I set aside a full day in September to do all the terrain. I watched several videos and did some reading online. A big debate in oil washing is whether or not to seal the miniature beforehand, and what I’d learned from my online research is that you didn’t need to seal it unless you didn’t want the oil to tint the miniature (in this case, I didn’t mind the terrain being darker). I’d also only had very minor issues in the past when I hadn’t sealed, with a little bit sometimes lifting, but I put this down to user error when rubbing too hard with the sponge to lift the oil. In the end, I sealed a few spots that had been painted with Contrast Paints, which are notoriously thin, and left everything else.
In total, the Great Washening–as I had dubbed it–included the following:
-16 1’ x 1’ Zone Mortalis tiles
-all the Zone Mortalis doors that went along with it
-2 Nachmund habs
-1 Nachmund Landing Pad
-Nachmund Satellite and Comms Array
-Nachmund Walls and Gates
-3 medium-to-large Sector Mechanicus pieces
-a MDF 3-storey Apartment Building (nicknamed the “Brownstone”)
-an Age of Sigmar dragon skeleton
I coated everything with the wash, using oil paints and thinner from an art store, the same materials I had used for previous projects. Once done, I left it an hour or two and came back with the sponge and thinner to lift the excess oil. I started with the Sector Mechanicus terrain, which had been primed with GW rattlecans. A little bit of Contrast I had forgotten to seal came away, but nothing else. The system worked.
I moved on to the ZM table, starting with a blank tile (no walls, just primed silver and some sponge weathering). Immediately I noticed some grey showing through. It was subtle, being silver on grey, but when you’ve worked on a project so long, you notice. I kept going, trying to be careful. I moved on to a second tile and the paint began rubbing off on the walls as well, going right down to the grey plastic, which was much more noticeable.
With dawning horror, I realized that every previous time I had rubbed oil or enamel paint away, it had been non-GW paint. I stopped on the ZM table and went back to the other terrain, working on the Brownstone and dragon skelly (which had been primed with GW cans). No issues. I moved onto the Nachmund terrain, which had been primed with Vallejo cans: same issue as the ZM table.
To put it lightly, I’d made a colossal error.
The Lesson
For the love of god, seal your models before applying oils. And I know this is coming from a yahoo on the internet, but don’t take advice from yahoos on the internet.
All those popular youtubers and hobby bloggers? They’re not chemists. They’re not professional artists. They don’t know what they’re talking about. At the end of the day, when we paint, we are dealing with chemicals and those chemicals interact in ways we may not expect. Sure, paints within a single paint range should theoretically work together (GW paints, for example, are famously beginner friendly with a well-defined system for painting) but when you start mixing those ranges, or even mixing different types of paint in the same range, they might not work as expected.
I can’t tell you how heart-wrenching it was to realize I had just catastrophically damaged a project I had been collecting and working on for years.
So take it from me: do a test model. Please.
The Less Disastrous Hobbying
The other big model I completed this year was a gift for Jason in the form of a T’au Avatar, which you can read about here. But other than that, it was planning for the ICI.
Post-ICI, I’ve been pivoting back to other projects, getting my Venomcrawler up to battle ready, and doing the basecoats on a 30k Tactical Squad (this is a quick and dirty army when it comes to painting, so all it needs left is to be sealed, oil washed, and based). I’m also getting close to finishing my indomitus captain. But after the ICI, I mostly played Space Marine 2 and Starfield.
In 2025, I’m hopefully getting back on the hobby train. I need to go back to the Zone Mortalis board and will probably paint over the oil to fix it up. Otherwise, there’s really too many projects on the go to predict what will catch my fancy.
Until then, Happy New Year!