Welcome back once again my friends, it’s me, keewa – Your wizard of weathering, your doyen of dirty, maven of mess, here to talk to you about another new painting product that’s taking the hobby world by storm: ProAcryl Newsh.
Newsh is a new weathering medium that aims to transform the way you weather and wash your miniatures. A very very extended drying retarder, Newsh works by allowing painters much more time and flexibility to use their ordinary acrylic paints in the same manner as an oil wash, but without the nasty poisonous and smelly solvents required to make oil washing work. That’s an incredibly bold claim, and I don’t blame you for being skeptical, but bear with me on this, okay?
So let’s do some tests, shall we?
Newsh comes in a fairly large bottle, which is good because you’re going to need quite a bit of it. By adding a decent quantity of Newsh to any acrylic paint (it doesn’t just work with ProAcryl, obviously) you get quite a thick goop which can be thinned slightly with a bit of water and slopped all over your piece like a normal paint – but here’s the rub, when Newsh is in the mix the paint will dry extremely slowly (for an acrylic paint). While your normal hobby acrylic paint will begin drying the moment it touches the plastic, especially at the edges (which is why you so often get tide-marks, the thinner outer edge of a blob of paint will dry much much faster than the centre where there’s more paint to share moisture) a Newsh’d paint won’t start drying for at least half an hour, this extremely lengthened drying time allows plenty of room for the user to rub off and spread the paint around without creating coffee stains or tearing layers of paint. Just like with an oil wash!
So to test this new miracle product and see if it’s really as they describe it, I primed and put some basic colours on a bunch of small scenery bits I had lying around, including some bulkheads and barricades from Necromunda, the portable barricades from Kill Team, and some of the Ork Mek-style scenery.
Starting out with some ProAcryl Mahogany and Newsh I blobbed it all over this shiny metal bulkhead, before carefully wiping away the excess with a makeup sponge.
The grime and muck collects nicely in the recesses and the smooth transitions from the removal already gives a nice weathered look with almost no effort, with a bit of chipping from silver paint on a sponge the terrain ultimately looked really nice, I’m proud of it!
Since Newsh is not actually oil, you can easily use a hairdryer to dry and “lock” it in; unlike with oil paints and solvents there’s no risk of reactivating previous layers, so going over and adding rust and verdigris with different colours is easy. In my opinion this way of painting is fun and “playful” compared to the normal use of acrylics, Newsh really rewards experimentation and general “fiddling about” to find what works best for the piece you’re painting. In this vein in particular I think Grimdark Practitioners(™) are going find lots to like about Newsh, being able to easily add all-over grimy tones and filters to their nasty work quite easily, and without the concerns about having nasty solvents in the house.
It’s not all sunshine and rainbows, though. Because of the nature of the process, if you use Newsh with expensive ProAcryl paints you are going to burn through them pretty fast, not only because you need to use a fair amount of paint with the Newsh, but the majority is going to get wiped off and “wasted”, for that reason it might be better to use Newsh with cheaper paints and artist’s acrylics. Another thing worth noting is that Newsh’d paint is quite sticky when it’s drying, so be careful not to handle your model too much when there’s Newsh on it, or you’ll get fingerprints and sticky hands.
You might have seen the occasional complaint that Newsh damaged paint by pulling up old layers and tearing them. I didn’t experience this much, and if I did it wasn’t down to the Newsh itself, but the method and tools being used to remove the Newsh. You need to be deliberate and gentle. If you rub too hard with a hard ear-bud or press down hard on corners without consideration you paint is absolutely going to tear. You’re not scrubbing a drain here, after all. This is nothing to do with Newsh at all, the same would happen if you were overzealous in removing oil paints.
I can’t really lay these problems at the door of ProAcryl or Newsh, however, as they’re caused by the ecosystem in which Newsh exists, rather than being caused by Newsh itself.
Another thing to note about Newsh is that it does not act like an oil wash for the purposes of panel lining and pin-washing as the mobility of Newsh’d paint is very very low, if you gob it onto a part of your model it won’t run and fill the recesses, but rather will simply sit where you put it until you move or remove it. The capillary action just is not there, so if you buy Newsh thinking you can use it to put panel lines on things you are going to be disappointed, just bear that in mind.
So with those tests out of the way, what’s my verdict on Newsh? I think this stuff is brilliant, I am so thrilled that I can do some really fun weathering without having to use stinky, poisonous solvents, I can just mess around with this non-toxic, non-smelly acrylic medium until the cows come home without wearing a gas mask or feeling like my head is going to pop like a balloon. That alone is reason enough for me to recommend Newsh, but through being able to use any acrylic colour you have, the versatility available is pretty much limitless.
Newsh is an opportunity to play while painting and still achieve great results. I think that’s something we can all appreciate.
Have any questions or feedback? Drop us a note in the comments below or email us at contact@goonhammer.com. Want articles like this linked in your inbox every Monday morning? Sign up for our newsletter. And don’t forget that you can support us on Patreon for backer rewards like early video content, Administratum access, an ad-free experience on our website and more.
