PL-01 - Colour modulation

I promised I'd try a hand at colour modulation, because I found the all-grey, little-surface-detail PL-01 too bland.

There are several techniques and an insane amount of videos on this topic. Because the base-coat was already there, pre-shading wasn't an option, so I decided to go over certain spots with a lighter version of the base-coat and others with a darker. I guess this technically qualifies it as post-shading.
When it's all done, I will also try with oils to see how easy that would be to achieve the same result.

The trick here is to go very slow, with translucent layers, and build up an effect. That means highly thinning your paint before you spray. In the past I experienced issues with just thinning paint in a ratio of  e.g. 10:1 (10 parts thinner to 1 part paint), where it would either not spray properly from my airbrush, or too quickly or the paint would spider.

My reasoning was I though I remembered reading somewhere that if you thin paint TOO much, it loses whatever quality makes it stick to the surface and it becomes a loose gathering of floating pigments instead.

So I decided to try a few different products.

Glaze medium

Sounds like something you'd thin paint with, but it's clearly meant for brush-painting figures. It's super-fluid, finds all nooks and crannies and flows there. Stays wet very long.

→ Not good.

Varnish (satin)

In a ratio of roughly 5:1 (varnish:paint) this sprayed just like I expected. Could have gone thinner for even more control over the effect.

→ Acceptable

Transparator

A product by Ammo specifically for thinning paint beyond the point where it is no longer considered paint. It sprayed iffy. I'm also more inclined to put it in the brush-painting section.

→ Meh

At this point, I was no longer sure wether my spraying issues were product-related or airbrush-related, so I decided to give it a good strip & clean to be sure. There was a lot of dried paint and gunk in the body, which can't really improve it's functioning.

Airbrush thinner

As a last resort, I tried again with my default thinner. Stripping and cleaning the airbrush must have done something, because trigger control was flawless and because this thinner evaporates very fast, you can go over the same spot only seconds later. The airflow of the airbrush is enough to dry the surface.

→ OK!

So, I guess I'm back to the same old product, just learned to clean the airbrush better or more often and keep tight on the trigger-control.

Ah yes, the result!

I used a lighter tone around panel lines (where the angle changes), on flat top pannels, the top-left quadrant of the gun barrel and several oddly-angled surfaces. Darker tones around the turret ring and towards the lower part of the side skirts.