Weathering heights - How to clean your palette with mud

Like often, I've engaged myself in a stupidly vast amount of projects at once... The good thing is that I'll be able to show you plenty of cool stuff at some point and that things get done. The bad thing being it takes some guts every now and then to get started given the amount on the table. But hey, this is not me whining or anything, just explaining why I needed a little break.

One of my favourite ways of avoiding hobby burn outs is to actually paint. I mean paint something I don't care much about and that can potentially provide rapid and high return on investment.

So here we are.

I've lately got my hands on a weathering kit from Vialudibunda. Good stuff, you get everything you need and you've got a nice selection of colours to play with. I know you can grind your own pastels into pigments but honestly, I've tried it and I've found ressources like time and energy were best invested in other things (and the result is better too this way).

Just to ease things a bit, I poured a bit of white spirit in a glass...

And got an old palette and 2 brushes. One used for taking the pigments from the pot to the palette, the other to apply the pigments with white spirit. Trust, me, using 2 different brushes will save you a lot of trouble.

First I have to say I started on a old tau kit that had been severely abused before and I just tried to fix a couple of things in the build and then zenithal sprayed it with dark grey from beow, light grey from the sides and white from above. A little white drybrush and wash of black and brown after that I was good to start.

Oh by the way, I know the thrusters are glued the wrong way, I thought this was a good way to just untau the thing.

After playing with the pigments for a while, I sealed them with a coat of antishine matt spray from Army painters (otherwise they'll still be able to go where they want). You do not realy want to try applying the varnish with anything else than a spray or airbush at that point of course.

Then I decided to add a bit of weathering with the faithful blister foam technique with a layer of reddish brown.

Followed by leadbelcher.

Et voilà ! I've kept it quite light and decided it was good enough.

It's easy to go over the top with weathering and I wanted something readible from a distance as I'll use this piece as scenery or objective marker.
I just had to add a few graffitis here and there just to make it more like it's sat here for years just gathering dust and dog piss.

I won't tell you what I'm working on but if you're good enough, I'm sure you can guess what Orctober and genestealer hybrids releases combined can lead to... ;)

(Bonus points for those who find where the grafs come from)