Tales from the Body Box - experiments with Flow Aid have varying results.

Earlier this year, I'd been talking about painting techniques with a hobby friend of mine, Chloe at Henhafod. Check out the Henhafod Instagram or Facebook pages for some lovely custom work! Both of us are handpaint-with-a-brush painters, rather than the airbrushing and pastelling favoured by most model horse artists, and the subject of Liquitex Flow Aid came up, a clear thin liquid which looks just like water but works in a much more technical way to push pigment molecules apart in water-based paints. It's supposed to make painting easier, and Chloe swears by it while I'd never even heard of it, so we agreed to seal some up in a little pot and pop it in with a parcel of bodies I'd bought.

So next time I'd got a colour idea and a body it'd suit, I decided to try the Flow Aid, and...

...it was almost a disaster.

This stuff changed everything I thought I knew about paint, it was like having a first go at customising all over again, I really struggled.
It seemed to make smooth blending much, much harder rather than easier, cos I'm used to using a tiny amount of reasonably thick paint, undiluted, layered on thinly to build colour by smudging it firmly to spread it around, and letting the colour underneath show through. This flowing medium just made the paint swim around wet, leaving marks and blobs and not sticking where I wanted it, no matter how tiny a touch of the stuff I added in.
For the dappling, it was fine; in fact, it did much the same as my trusted old favourite - and vaguely disgusting - method of licking the brush before touching the paint, so it goes on with a little bit of sticky spit and can be teased into blurry dapples before it dries too much to move. Told you I'm disgusting. 
But this high-tech additive definitely didn't do my painting any favours for the base colour and shading- I had a huge amount of damage limitation to do by trying to cover up and smooth the worst of it, then add more normal, dry shading to hide the bad parts by turning him into a sooty buckskin instead.

I've named him El Cometa after the comet which was visible in the skies at the time I painted him. Well, some of him. Because the worst part is, I've only painted one side!

I found the paint with Flow Aid in just didn't want to dry, so I couldn't turn the horse over to paint the other side without it sticking to me and smearing the paint layers off faster than I could put them on! So he's strictly a photo show only model, cos the non-display side is just plain beigey tan all over - I know I can't just fill it in another day, there's no way I'd ever manage to make the same rescued mess of a paintjob twice, hahah! 

So, having discovered that it was a big hinderance to producing genuinely nice and non panicky paintwork, I made up my mind that I'd keep it just for dappling on my next attempt, which came along pretty quickly...

The August page of my horsey calendar had a beautiful dark dappled mulberry grey Iberian horse, and as soon as I'd turned that page, I'd had the idea of painting him. And in my most recent batch of bodies was a suitable mould, the new(ish) Mirado, which I'd given a little chunk of extra mane when I had some leftover mixed Milliput from fixing a dent in a different body! I just wasn't keen on the gap between the mane and the back on my OF one, so filling it in before painting seemed like the best way to go for my first custom on the mould.

Here he is, Harecroft Fénix (the Portuguese for 'phoenix', the mythical fire bird). 

All his base colour was done by hand brushing undiluted paint, then the dapples were added with Flow Aid in the mix, with a final layer of paler grey dry-brush shading over the top to lighten and soften the colour a little bit. The dapples do look ok, perhaps a little on the blobby, blotchy side, but then that's always an issue with painting by brush, and something I've always struggled with - I wouldn't say they look any worse than usual, though, which I'll call a resounding success after the terrible first attempt!

I do really like how he turned out, not just that he's a satisfyingly accurate match for the calendar horse, but that his colour looks perfectly fine from a distance - close up photos always seem to catch and accentuate every little flaw and weakness in the paintwork, which just don't look at all obvious when looking at them in-hand or on the shelf. 

The mould also seems a little deeper through the girth thanks to the addition of the extra mane, I think I'll be doing the same again if I end up with any more of these to customise in future.

And look, here's proof that I actually did paint this one just as well on the other side! 

It's an interesting mould for pictures, because both sides can be posed toward the camera without one shot looking awkward or facing away - I prefer the off side on this particular model because of the extra mane laying down behind that shoulder, but it's still a decent photograph from this 'wrong' side, too.

That's it for now, for my next custom I left the lid firmly shut on the Flow Aid and stuck to paint as I know and love it, with just a little lick of the brush if I needed it to flow! 

But don't let me put you off.

As I said, my friend absolutely loves this stuff and finds painting infinitely more difficult without it, so there's two sides to every experiment in such a creative and individual hobby as this : what I find to fall generally on the side of failure, and reach 'phew it's no worse than normal' at best, may well be your next big success!