Phlegmforlorn":1ecv2dtp said:
Whats the benefit adding Pledge into the mix?
That peculiar odour!
Ok ok, most of it goes away eventually...
Pledge acts as flow improver/paint carrier. What this basically means is that applying it with paint reduces the amount of pigment in the mixture while maintaining most of the paint/ink-like qualities. Advantage of pledge is that it also reduces surface tension of the paint as the product, being floor polish/wax, is meant to go into the floor surface smoothly, including small recesses, cuts etc.
Compared to, for example, Vallejo inks, the stuff really flows. It also does not dry immediately, which helps cleaning excess stuff and gives control. I have found Army Painter Dark Tone/Soft Tone inks a bit iffy (wax-like, they hang on the surface but do not go into recesses that easily) and Pledge/Jonhson’s really helped with that.
The best thing with the mixture I used is that it really did not darken the high spots of the figures – thus I was able to just ink/colour the white base with just one coat (which gave light ink/wash-like look) and strengthen the shades with Pledge mixture.
I came up with Johnson’s/Pledge after thinking about painting with inks – they’re nice, but, on white, the colour is often quite strong (highlights need working most of the time). Thus inks I found are too strong. And washes I found too thin and difficult to control in general (meaning several coats are needed to get desired colour, too slow for speed painting, and washes also have a tendency to colour the high spots too much when applied in several coats). So I kind of figured out what I needed and after googling “making your own washes” and other stuff I found the product.
Water does not contain acrylic medium (as Johnson’s/flow improver does), which means it doesn’t produce similar results (colour pigments “break” and produce uneven results when a lot of water is applied). But water can work too, especially in the first stage (painting the basic colours).
This is the bottle I used (texts in Finnish, it says “(stone)tile & linoleum floor polish):
http://www.transmeri.fi/mediabank/539_original.png
I don't know how much these thing vary by country... I could send a sample (in a paint bottle) to someone who really really wants the exactly same stuff, but I don't think I can make a career out of this
After little googling I suspect that even this product may be discontinued/changed... weird. I found my own bottle from a discount store.
