Painting Veins with Agrellan Earth

I am going to try something new. I saw this article on BoLS about using the "cracked earth" technical paint to quickly and easily paint veins on wings. Now for the most part BoLS produces nothing but garbage, but this may be closer to compost. For starters, notice the article is titled “Painting Veins the EASY Way” with the emphasis being theirs. The focus on BoLS is for fast, easy, and low effort and how you can dry-brush, net-list or rules-lawyer your way to the middle. It shows in everything they produce, but there may be something interesting here.

Even though Caleb Dillion does not understand how to capitalize properly or how to do an aside, he hints that, with flesh tones and layering of colors, you could use generic crackle medium to compose a variety of effects. It would be interesting if there was a technique that allowed for those effects without the effort, but I am dubious.

I was going  to use this on an in-progress Bloodthirster but there is no way that I am going to experiment on a almost finished model. I painted this base Mordian Blue and let it dry. Then I covered it Agrellan Earth and let that dry. Then I covered it with Mechrite Red. You can see the results for yourself on the top picture. 

Then in the middle picture I thought that if I colored the Agrellian Earth with Mechrite red and put that over Mordian Blue, that might work. Nope. When diluted down, the Agrellan Earth does not crack. 

In the bottom picture, I just painted Agrellan Earth over Mordian Blue. It makes these tiny cracks but still looks like dried cracked earth. 

In the end I call this a fail. I'll try again with crackle medium but I think my Bloodthirster's wings will have to be painted the old fashioned way with effort, hard work and skill. (See how I brought it back around?)

In the end, I can say that Agrellan Earth is really only good making a cracked earth base. That makes its utility really low. If you are going to base your army in this manner, Agrellan Earth is the easiest way to do that one thing. If you want to do anything else with cracked textures, then a crackle medium may be a better bet.