Making your own Typhus Corrosion

I love the Citadel Technical paint called Typhus Corrosion. It adds a grayish brown color to whatever you apply it to while at the same time adding texture. I've used it on tank tracks, Nurgle daemons and various undead models. As an example the sword of this Great Unclean One was painted with Typhus Corrosion then drybrushed with Ryza Rust and Leadbelcher.

All that and halitosis too...

The same technical paint is also quite useful to add to terrain if you want to rough up a surface, add rust or just cover up a horrendous mistake. Unfortunately as the size of terrain grows the cost of adding Typhus Corrosion becomes prohibitive. To find away around this I searched the internet and asked around various Facebook groups. Unfortunately aside from finding several other people looking for an answer, I did not find a magic formula for making my own. So I went for the next best thing and went for a garden shed experiment. Now my mix will need the following properties:

• Apply like a wash;
• Contain a fine texture;
• Have a filthy brackish brown-grey-green color;
• Stick to whatever I apply it to;
• Be cheap!

To fulfill these properties I went for the following materials:

• Use Pledge Floor Polish (for that old ancient school wash creation vibe);
• Add aviary bird sand (shell sand to translate literally from Dutch) as this is about the finest sand I know off (that is sold in large containers);
• Use brown, black, grey and green acrylics;
• Add PVA;
• Use only the cheapest components in my shed :)

For my first experiment I grabbed a discarded small size plastic soda bottle as it can be closed and hopefully keep my mix from drying out too quickly. Because I love to use a highly precise scientific approach I measured everything to the gram and...oh no wait I'm sloppy when I hobby around so I eyeballed it, took pictures for future reference. So here with some made up measurement of my own is my mix.

I first added a layer of the aviary bird sand. 

Step 1:pour in some shell sand.

Next I added a serious glob of PVA glue. I aimed for about as much glue as there was sand in the bottle.

Step 2: add PVA 

To this I added a large dollop of Pledge Floor Polish, about as much as the glue and sand together. 

Step 3: add Pledge Floor Polish (and make mental note to turn step 3 into stap 1 for future mixing projects).

Looking good (or rather awful to be precise). Time to grab the really cheap acrylics.

Cheap acrylics, not for use on highly detailed miniatures but excellent for (almost) all your terrain painting needs.

I squeezed in a drop of green, a large helping of grey and a few drops of both brown and black. The green should just be hinted at, the brown should be vaguely present, the black is there to darken the green and brown and the grey forms the basis. If you want to be more careful with this, try a mix on a palette first. I just poured and hoped.

Step 4: add cheap acrylics.

Next I started shaking the bottle (after closing the top tightly) and discovered my rookie mistake. When you want to mix solid components and fluids it is far smarter to start with the fluids as this helps around to time you start shaking it. Now my sand was squeezed tight at the bottom and to make it worse I covered it in a nice strong layer of glue. Sigh. I shrugged added a bit of water to make everything a bit more fluid and alternated shaking and tapping the bottom. I imagine this is a bit akin to how ketchup-eating people get to their favorite condiment (but then on steroids). I ended up with a bottle that looked to contain very suspicious cola (or as most people would call it: cola).

Step 5: Shake, rattle and roll...

Next I took a useless brush and a discarded bit of base containing spillover resin. I shook the bottle a bit more and applied my mix to the resin.

A glob of homemade corrosion added to a glob of discarded resin. Nurgle should be proud.

The ugly strokes are caused by my useless brush, as it turned out I had already abused this particular brush sometime earlier to apply PVA and never got around to fully cleaning it. This was not beneficial for the bristles. Shrugging I waited about ten minutes and drybrushed my blob with Necron Compound (it was in use at the time). This is the end result.

Drybrushing silver to test if the glue holds everything together...test successful.

So does it work? Well on the next picture some of the filthy parts are covered with Typhus Corrosion and other parts are covered with the above mix. I have to admit I'm satisfied.

Some of the dirty bits here are covered with homemade corrosion others are covered with official Typhus Corrosion. I think the experiment was a succes in one go. So on to step 6: a small and nerdy victory dance (not pictured).