painting help

[nosirrahkcaz]

Well I have two questions really, I just use water to thin my paints and it seems I cant quite get it just right its either too watered down and hard to control or too think to blend well. What else can I use besides water? Also I just picked up some confrontation models and I was wanting to know what colors to use to get the really deep red that you see on the armour of the tyrant vile tis armour and the colors for the nice soft green on the pants. thanks in advance.

 

[Mosch]

I can\'t help you with the colour choice, but I CAN disappoint you concerning your first question Basically it comes down to experience. Keep at it and sooner or later you will find how much water you need.... I know, it\'s not much help, but true unfortunately. What brand of paints do you use? Some are simply worse than others.
As for additives, there are literally dozens. It all depends on what you\'re trying to do. Many people, including me, add something to break surface tension, especially when doing washes. I use acrylic floor finish, about 1 part to 4 parts water, and thin my washes with this mixture. I also use something called \"acrylic painting medium\" which helps the paint to flow better and kinda decreases the opacity and \"flow medium\" which makes the paint flow better while keeping the opacity mostly intact. Both are made for craft paints but work equally well for my Vallejo/GW-paints.

Oh, and by the way: Welcome to the forums, Mr. Harrison.

 

[GunjiNoKanrei]

Originally posted by nosirrahkcaz... its either too watered down and hard to control ...

This sounds like you have to much paint on your brush. Make sure to unload the brush on a paper towel (or similar) before applying paint to the miniature.
When painting with very thin paint you don\'t want to flood the miniature.

 

[Ritual]

Originally posted by GunjiNoKanrei

Originally posted by nosirrahkcaz... its either too watered down and hard to control ...

This sounds like you have to much paint on your brush. Make sure to unload the brush on a paper towel (or similar) before applying paint to the miniature.
When painting with very thin paint you don\'t want to flood the miniature.

Yeah, this is probably your problem... too much paint on your brush.

I\'d strongly recommend learning to paint without additives before you start using them. In most cases you don\'t need anything but water, but if you learn to paint using all sorts of stuff in your paint you will think you can\'t paint without them. The key is learning to contol your paint and additives will not help you do that, only change the way the paint behaves somewhat. You may find that an additive makes your painting acceptable despite not having control over your paint, but it\'s better to learn controlling the paint properly!

Of course, this depends on what your goals are...

 

[War Paint]

Agree totally with the above. Takes a while to get right.

As for red, this discussion has plenty. Make sure you post to see how its going

http://www.coolminiornot.com/forums/viewthread.php?tid=15882

 

[nosirrahkcaz]

thanks for all the help, I will def. try to use some better brush/ paint control... i kinda thought some of it may have been inexperience, but sometimes you need to hear someone else say it to get it to sink in, thanks guys also I\'ve been using citadel but lately I\'ve thought of switching to vallejo

 

[Ritual]

You can easily use both GW and Vallejo paints (they are inter-mixable), so there\'s no need to chuck out your Citadels if you start buying Vallejo. Buy Vallejo paints that complement your range of Citadel paints and if you like them better you can change the Citadel paints to Vallejo as you run out of them.

 

[nosirrahkcaz]

yea thats what im starting to do now. I just got these confrontation models and im wanting to try out so NMM on them. to take a color like purple and make it NMM i just add gray and progressively add more white/gray into while I build my highlights up, is that the general idea