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One little trick I picked up quite some time ago was to make a nail polish water bath. One can swirl together different colors, then apply it to a model to get interesting affects. I'd tried it on a couple of sprues of Bones material, but never was inspired to actually use the technique. This last weekend, I was shopping with the family and wandered into Hot Topic, where they had several interesting nail polishes. And so, I bought three different bottles, but I'll be using only one of them here, a red and black mottled polish in clear. Let's start with the basics. A completely unwashed, unprimed Gnomic, and a quick shot of the actual nail polish. The polish was dropped into the water bath by putting a lot of excess liquid on the nail brush. For the water bath itself, I am using an old lunch meat container. It's silly, but the lunch meat comes in a little bag, packaged in these little containers. It's my standard every day work lunch, so I've got a lot of them. Ruining one will not matter to me. The polish itself, I was a bit disappointed in. I was hoping for pink flakes in a black base color polish, but it turns out the polish base is clear, and it is pink and black flakes. Oh well, have to roll with that then. Now, when the drop is put in, it'll either sink to the bottom, where it becomes useless, or float on top of the water and start expanding. It sort of flows out over the surface, in almost a 2D explosion. I think the top surface then rapidly dries, but for a while at least, the polish is sandwiched between the upper dry layer and the water underneath. Here's where the magic happens. In an open part of the water, I dip the model piece down, then bring it up underneath the puddle of polish floating on the surface. It will wrap itself around the part, forming a film of sorts. I then set the part aside and work on another. I'd coated most of the parts, and decided that I didn't have enough variety in color. Really, I probably could have used an old toothbrush to splatter paint over the figure and get just as decent a look. However, since I planned from the beginning to make this a WIP/Technique thread, I wanted something that shows off the technique a little better. Since I have a small collection of dollar store polishes for just such a purpose, I grabbed a red one. Same process as the mottled polish, but when it spreads out, it makes just a small to large puddle. It To the rescue, a toothpick! I already had one that I was using to clean out the little clear polish puddles that were left floating. Another was pressed into service and used to swirl the red (now pinkish) puddle into something more streaky. This took a little work to get just right, but I was left with little streaks of color over the CAV. It turned a bit more purple/pink than red. I also tried a little bit of white, but I didn't like it nearly as much. The results are below, drying on top of the now empty water bath container. The plan forward is to brush off any poorly adhered film, and to remove any film where it has bridged a gap. I'll soon paint the crew's windows, and pick out a few little details here and there, but the "base" coloring in nail polish is complete. From decision to actually do this to the state you see above was about 45 minutes. If I had remembered how to do this a little better, it could have been less time and a little better placement of the coloring.

Hi, I'm trying to figure out a paint scheme for my Rach force in CAV SO. I want it easy enough to paint in batch, appealing enough, and not the traditional full red scheme. Here is what I came up with for a few models: I really love the Gnomic model. There is something about the asymmetrical look that appeals to me. And a few details: C&C welcome