Tough Color

[Firespin]

Alrighty, after about a year I\'ve picked up my brush and paints again. I decided to start be repainting my warhammer 40k tau army. Unfortunately, I\'m dead set on having their fatigues orange.

Little did I know that orange is extremely hard to paint, at least for me. I\'ve been testing it out on a few other minis and have not been having good results. I still get that awful basecoat-showing-through-the-paint-in-spots deal. I\'ve tried both black and white for basecoats, neither of them worked very well. I also tried building up from black with black to brown to dark red to red to orange. At red, however, it starts to get the same effect.

I need help. I\'d really like a good solid coat of orange with no splotches, but I need it to be done in relatively few steps, being that I have to paint an entire army in this manner and don\'t have an extraordinary amount of time.

Thanks for your help!

 

[Shawn R. L.]

Try white - yellow - yellow/orange - orange.

 

[johnboyjjb]

For tough basecoats I use 2 drops of color mised with one drop of black or grey.

 

[Einion]

The practical problem that you\'re encountering is that the orange you\'re using is fairly transparent, which isn\'t unusual given that they tend to be made from a certain type of pigment and not something expensive like cadmiums.

I would suggest you might try undercoating the area in something like a sand or light earth colour as these tend to be fairly opaque and covering this adequately with the orange you have shouldn\'t be as difficult as white or black.

Einion

 

[Amazon warrior]

Orange is bloody difficult. I did some of my Dirz orange, and I used a dark red-orange with a touch of brown as a starting point. Then lots of layers adding in yellow to highlight. It was quite tricky to get it looking even half-way smooth, tho. This is what I managed:

 

[Fizl]

I paint my orange things using a flesh colour as the base.

Shaz

 

[Firespin]

Alrighty, so I tried all of the above (except the flesh colored one which sounds pretty good) and I found that the best way to do it is white, then yellow and then orange. You can also put red down after the yellow and get a slightly darker orange, which is pretty neat. It takes two-ish coats to get a nice smooth color, but thats easily few enough steps to get the desired effect for a mass painting project.

Thanks for all your help.