Painting a Drop Pod... or any vehicle.

What process do you follow when painting a large(r) vehicle without using an airbrush.

I am painting my Pod for the competition, and After I got my main colors on I went to give it a wash of GW crimson and now it looks butt ugly. Really demoralized by the turn out as washes are SUPPOSED to make the model pop... So now I don't know. Thinking I need to dry brush my base coat back on and hope it covers up the ugly of the wash....

Any advice? Should I have *not* given it a wash and just went straight to the edge highlights?

Thanks,

So, this might not help you but this is what I would do to paint what I believe is a BA pod?

1.Spray the whole thing red of your choice

2.Paint any metal bitz (engines, fins, trim, etc) and do any metallic drybrushing that needs doing

3.Wash the whole thing with Seraphim Sepia, Reikland Fleshshade, or Agrax Earthshade, your choice depending how dark you want it. You want a wash that is darker than your base to get in the nooks and crannies to bring out details.

4.Go do something else while drying

5.Do any edge highlighting you want to do with a red of your choice, and any other metallic drybrushing that needs doing. Larger panels can get a thinned down red layering to lighten stuff up

6.Apply Bloodletter glaze to the red parts

7.Weathering if you want

8.Profit.

This is pretty much the standard formula I use for all of my vehicles, simply changing colours around depending on the army. Hope that helps!

the reason washes suck on drop pods is because washes don't work well on large flat surfaces. They end up pooling and looking gross. Applying washes only in recesses and then re-applying your base color to the flat areas (to get an even tone) followed by light edge highlighting really works better and saves on wash.

Yea like Paz said, you weren't wrong in using the red wash. If you've ever read the 6th ed paint guide, that's the one the art studio uses to paint blood angels. The problem is when doing large models, you have to focus where you apply it by using a detail brush or a size one step up from that. Character, if you use army painter brushes. Once it's dry, you have to go over the main panels with your original color to hide all of the areas you went too far out from the crevices with the wash. Afterwards, edge your red. If you base coated with Mephiston red, then do your first edge with evil sunz scarlet, and a second finer edge with either jokaero orange or if you splurged for the official "edge" category paints, lugganath orange. I think lugganath looks better though for final edging reds.

Another thing I've seen done is someone drybrushed Ryza rust on the edges carefully. Looked pretty good too.