Oils are fantastic when you’ve got big smooth surfaces to blend on—think larger scale busts. So of course I decided to do the opposite and test them on something that’s basically allergic to that approach: the insanely detailed Horus Heresy Saturn 9 Predator kit. This thing is somewhere around 80 bits, takes hours just to build, and a lot of the detail gets hidden under huge shoulder plates anyway… but I love the sculpt, so I set myself a challenge: can I make oils work on a kit that’s this busy? I start with a colored acrylic undercoat through the airbrush, then do a quick violet preglaze to establish shadows. The big takeaway here is that on highly detailed models, you can’t really do my usual “hit the whole model” approach—your preglaze dries out while you’re still fighting your way around all the little elements. Where oils really shine is on the larger armor volumes: I place shadow, midtone, and highlight next to each other and blend with a clean brush for effortless transitions and depth. The tradeoff is control—oils want to go soft, and on trims, edges, and NMM reflections it’s way harder for me to keep things razor sharp. The experiment *kind of* worked. I learned I need to push contrast harder, resist over-blending, and sometimes just let a layer dry so I can come back wet-on-dry for crisp highlights. Not perfect, but that’s the point—each challenge makes the next model better.