Hey all, trying a new colour scheme for my dark angels and I’m trying to achieve a gradation effect in my armour with dry brushing. But it’s looking I dunno, a little fuzzy? I don’t have the skill to see what’s going wrong here, please help!
#Fuzzy paint job
sick cedar
sick cedar
An update of my next model for context
young cloak
drybrushing is really good for picking up edges, but does not work well on flat or curved surfaces. It excels on textured areas like fur. What you're encountering on your DAs is that space marines have large surface areas, so they're not great to drybrush. If you're still new to painting, what you can do is use a wash/shade over the top, which helps darken the areas down and "hides" some of the murky underneath. Once you're more comfortable painting, the next step would be to actually paint on those shades and not rely on the wash.
Additionally for your drybrushing, if you are seeing a "chalky" effect, it ironically is because your brush is too dry. If you paint with a purely dry brush, the paint will dry on your bristles so you'll only get one good "brush stroke" on the mini before the rest start depositing chunky bits and leaving that chalky effect behind. To drybrush, you want a just-damp brush, as that will keep the paint from drying too quickly on your brush. Test it on your hand or another surface before applying paint to the mini to make sure you don't have it too wet and it starts to paint normally.
sick cedar
This is such a wonderfully detailed piece of advice - thank you mate I’ll aim to keep this in mind as I develop my other angels. I think the second image posted feels like a better version of what I was wanting to achieve and that was because I kept the paint all pretty wet