I posted this to basically say that I am not very good at layering or wet blending. I can do it if I put my mind to it, but maybe a better way to say it is that I don't do it enough to be comfortable with it. I love Foundry Paints for their consistency and coverage but I'm just not good as using them as they are intended (that triage-3 step process where you're hand-painting one color on top of the next progressing up to the highest points with the brightest color.
Wet blending forget it, I find I have neither the patience nor do I see in 28mm scale the appreciable difference visually when compared to using easier techniques.
I had to stumble through several years of this before I found what worked best for me and where I could use my strengths. I'm much better at drybrushing over a wash.
For clothing with ripples and wrinkles, I've become accustomed to and fairly proficient at spraying a model in the base color, doing a wash that matches the tone of the cloth, and then doing a single highlight in a tone that as close as possible matches the base coat spray. In this way I can achieve pretty darn near the same visual effect that you could also do with layering and blending.
Not to say that I never use the Foundry triage or the Citadel groups to do that 3-level layering. I do things like AWI British where Foundry's Redcoat triage works excellently.
But for my Cadians here, where I didn't have a triage of paints that were in a tone I wanted, I fell back on the drybrushing over a wash. In this way I can get a lot of models primary uniform color done quickly. And in doing so it doesn't matter if I drybrush over other parts of the model like the faces or equipment since those are going to be painted other colors any way!
For better or worse, here's what my technique looks like. Some people find that drybrushing makes models look too "dusty". But I actually like that kind of rough look to cloth and uniforms. It gives them a good visual texture from tabletop height.
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