The road to Coventry...part two.

So, it's time to make a start. I'd decided what I wanted to do was to give the armour the look of real turquoise, with a bit of texture and patterning to it, and maybe a bit of marbling too. Kind of like what I did many years ago with this Dark Eldar...

So, with a mixture of stippling and sponging, using various combinations of Ahriman Blue, Baharroth Blue and Guass Blaster Green I had this:

Then I played about with some darker tones, using washes applied carefully with a sponge, leaving it looking like this:

I then painted on a couple of layers of matt varnish to smooth it over and left it a couple of days to dry. 

Tick.

Tick.

Tick.

Looking at it fresh a couple of days later I decided it wasn't going the way I wanted it to at all. I really wanted to introduce some marbling to it and the overall effect was too dark for that. Unfortunately, I'd put the paint on quite thick to get the textured effect and this, coupled with the layers of varnish, meant that it was not possible to simply paint over it to lighten it up so I decided to strip it and start over. It's drastic, I know, but better that than spend ages trying to salvage it and maybe having to strip it in the end. 

All is not lost, though, as it give me the opportunity to provide...

A NOTE ON STRIPPING 

It's something that comes up over and over again wherever there is discussion on miniature painting: "How do you strip the paint off your models?" and all sorts of solutions are usually put forward, from the everyday household chemicals (Dettol, Biostrip, Simple Green*) to the downright dangerous (brake fluid.) Personally, I've been using Dettol for years and it does the job well, but it's a pain in the arse to use, expensive (you can only really use it once) and it stinks. Recently, however, one of the attendees of my local painting group (hi Seb!)put me on to this stuff from Superdrug: 

And it's bloody brilliant. It does the job faster and better than Dettol. Simply soak the miniature in it for a couple of hours (or overnight if you prefer- it won't hurt the model), scrub with a toothbrush and rinse off with warm water. The active ingredient is isopropyl alcohol so look out for any where that is the main ingredient. Even better is this one:

from Poundland, as it's pure isopropyl alcohol but, being Poundland, I can't find the stuff in there on a regular basis.
Anyway, isopropyl alcohol is now my go-to stuff for stripping miniatures. It's clean, re-useable, relatively safe to use and it's cheap. I've no doubt that, if you have a friendly or local industrial chemical supplier, you could buy it by the bucketload even cheaper. And, if you want proof that it works, here's my Questor after soaking overnight and a two-minute scrub:

So, it's back to the start we go...