Slitherine

I've always been a slap dash painter when it comes to figures, putting on the base coat, but not doing much as far as highlighting, shading etc. For my Moravian army, which has a lot of guys wearing bleached linen tunics, I'm trying to add some definition, but washes are getting absorbed by the flat white and turning everything dark grey. What am I doing wrong? Should I be sealing the figs first? or is there another technique I should be using. I've got 8 stands of spearmen and 24 stands of LF archers that need help now plus another 7 BGs worth of spears and all the mounted in progress.

You might want to try dipping your figures. This is an article on TMP that describes the technique along with some further links.

Chris

It might help to know what sort of wash you are using. I'm guessing black paint thinned down from what you are saying has happened. On whites, you probably want to use a grey or brown wash if you are doing it before sealing the figures.
You need to make sure that your ink or paint is thinned down with flow aid (or even washing up liquid) as that will help ensure that it flows off raised surfaces and into the crevices. If that doesn't work, you could try doing the washes after giving the figures a coat of gloss varnish.
The method I use (which seems to work equally well on whites through dark colours) combines the gloss coat with the shading wash. My mixture consists of 40 drops of brown ink and 5 drops of black ink in 100 ml of "Klear" (in the UK = Pledge Multi-Surface Wax). You can see the results on my blog - it's on Blogger , title = Wargaming Girl (I'm too new to the forum to be allowed to post the URL) . The advantage of this method over "the dip" is that all the components are water soluble and don't smell nasty.

Or if you are lazy like me, you could undercoat in black, forget about washes, and slap a single coat of paint on...but in a patchy way, achieving some slightly different colouration, allowing some black to remain peeking through in places. Not so much "dry brushing", and definitely not "wet brushing", let's say "damp brushing".

Maybe not as pretty, especially up close, as more comprehensive painting techniques, but it does get away from that sea-of-dull-monochrome-tunics issue and looks quite good to me at normal viewing distances.

I think my favorite technique was a collegue who simply spray painted his Indians brown and then dabbed on some white for their garments, and painted the top of their heads black.