Devlan Mud alternative wash

A apparently you cannot get the Devlan mud wash anymore I looked for an alternative and this little recipe was found at

I like the sound of it.

I remember some years back chatting to a guy at polytech who painted heaps of 1/72 scale soldiers and often would over coat them in PVA glue. I was skeptical but apparently it made the paint stay.

The washes we had from GW flowed well and dried well… so I suspect this recipe will work.

All I need to to get some Matt medium.

…my “devlan mud” style wash is:
3 drops elmer’s(PVA glue)
10 drops matte medium
5 drops water
10 drops brown ink
1 drop black ink…

Edit: 18th October.

I have been looking to make up some more Devlan Mud wash as it is so good I have been using it all up.
However one ingredient is horribly expensive.
Brown ink. Once the colour used by financial auditors in the ledgers it has fast gone out of vouge in the stationary market. You can’t buy big bottles of it. You can only get little 25ml bottles for a reasonably high price.

So I have decided to make an alternative. I will be trying it out soon.

Instead of 10 drops of brown ink I will try using Burnt sienna dye or dye powder in the mix.
Dye is very strong in colour and depending on how you dilute it you can change its properties.
I bought some FAS dye for about $12 and this is enough to make. A 30gm bottle of dye looks to be about enough to make 7 cups of dye for art purposes. So may make about 5 cups of ink substitute.
It’s also Kiwi made and that’s cool.
SO $12 for about 7 x 250ml Burnt sienna dye or $12 for 15ml of W&N brown ink.
I will use the last of my first batch and do a comparison on a texture soon.

One Reply to “Devlan Mud alternative wash”

  1. Bought some matt medium today. paid way too much for it 250ml was about 28 dollars. So i figure this would be equal to… GW pots are 12ml and the recipe asks for 29 parts of which matt medium is 10 parts.. so thats 34% of it.. 34% of 12ml is 4.14 mils. or $3.1 worth of a pot… so the 250ml pot has enough medium for 60 pots of wash or $186 dollars worth so I could possibly make $540 dollars worth of equivalent wash…

    sweet.

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