Paint the Town

A few of the acrylic paints in my collection. From left to right: Vallejo Model Color in Chocolate Brown, Liquitex Soft Body Acrylic in Payne's Gray, Liquitex Heavy Body Acrylic in Van Dyke Red, and Golden Fluid Acrylic in Interference Orange.

It's the last day before the official start of NaMoPaiMo, and I thought I'd talk about something most of us participants are probably going to use at some point during National Model Painting Month: Paint!

 

There are a lot of different kinds of paint out there, as well as a lot of people with very strong opinions on the subject. As always, I think the most important thing is to experiment and find the materials and techniques that work best for you. Don't be afraid to try new things, and always remember to read and follow the safety information on your paint!

 

I'll be talking about acrylic paint today, since that is what I have the most of and use the most often. I generally do some combination of airbrushing and hand painting, and will often use other media like pigments and colored pencils, but in this post I'll be talking more about types of paint than techniques.

 

My bottle of Golden's Yellow Oxide Golden Acrylic. I love that they put a swatch of the actual paint on the bottle over an area of black and white stripes. This is very helpful as it allows you to see what the color looks like dry, how opaque it is, and so forth.

I use a variety of brands, but the majority of my paint collection consists of artist's quality Golden, Liquitex, and Vallejo. Some people create amazing models using student grade paints or even craft paints, but I prefer the stronger, richer colors of the artist's quality paints, even though they are more expensive. Golden and Liquitex paints come in different consistencies (such as 'heavy body' and 'fluid.') I generally like the thinner consistency paints for models, but some colors only come in the thicker consistencies. Vallejo Model Colors are specifically designed for painting models and have a thin consistency. They also have there own system of colors which can make it hard to compare Vallejo colors to other more typical artist's acrylics.



The back of the same bottle. The chart at the top tells you the relative opacity, finish, thickness, and tinting ability of the paint. Also on the back is a list of pigment used and the important Health & Safety section.

As far as the number of colors you need, it really depends on the color you want to paint. How you use your colors is more important than how many you use. For some models, particularly grays, I might only use 2-3 colors of paint on the body mixed in different proportions. But for some other models I might use 15+ colors of paint. I suggest collecting as many colors as you can so you have as many options as possible. Paint can be expensive, but if you add a tube or two at a time and take advantage of sales and coupons, you'll eventually be able to accumulate an impressive collection of colors.

 

The body color of this mini Scarlett resin (sculpted by Stacy Tumlinson) was done entirely with Titanium White, Burnt Umber, and Payne's Gray (additional colors were used for details such as her hooves and eyes)

If you're just starting out and are wondering which colors to buy, my suggestion would be to start out with: Titanium White, Naples Yellow, Raw Sienna, Burnt Sienna, Burnt Umber, and Payne's Gray.

 

Titanium White is a bright, snowy white. It's quite opaque, and can be used to make transparent colors more opaque in addition to making them paler.

 

Naples Yellow is a pale, warm yellow that I tend to prefer over the slightly more greenish Yellow Ocher. Naples Yellow is opaque and can sometimes be a bit too yellow on its own, but is easily toned down with the addition of brown and/or white

 

Raw Sienna is a nice caramel brown. Generally at least somewhat translucent, its very nice for shading more yellowish colors like palominos and bay duns. Also very useful when painting golden bays, browns, and chestnuts. When mixed with white it makes a nice base color for shell hooves.

 

Burnt Sienna is a more reddish brown, very useful as a starting point for bays, browns, and chestnuts. Usually mostly opaque, though Liquitex also makes a 'Transparent Burnt Sienna.' When mixed with white it can make some really nice flesh tones that are useful for painting areas with pink skin.

 

Burnt Umber is a warm, dark brown, good for shading a lot of different colors. It's usually quite opaque, but as with Burnt Sienna, Liquitex also makes a 'Transparent Burnt Umber' that I really like. It mixes well with most other browns and in most cases works a lot better than black for making them darker.

 

Payne's Gray is a dark gray with a strong bluish tint. It's often a bit too blue on its own, but it mixes well with orange or reddish browns to make more neutral grays and blacks. Mixed with white it makes a nice base color for dark hooves. Be careful when mixing it with yellowish colors as you're likely to end up with something rather green!

You'll notice that black is not on the list. That's because I was trying to keep the list as short as possible and I don't really consider black a 'necessary' part of one's color pallet. I generally prefer to mix my own black using a combination of Payne's Gray and Burnt Umber. This mixture is more translucent and has more depth than straight up black paint, which can look a bit flat, especially when painted over large areas. But if you want to get some black paint, by all means go for it! I myself have a bottle of Golden's Fluid Acrylic in Carbon Black that I use quite frequently for smaller details.

To give you a better idea of the colors you can make with these six paints, I made this grid showing different two-color combinations:
 

Different colors that can be mixed using the six colors mentioned above. For combinations that appear more than once, I mixed the paints in slightly different proportions for different squares so you can get a better idea of the possible colors.

Making a grid like this can be a great way to get to know your paints better, and you might be surprised to see how some of the combinations turn out! Of course, if you have a lot of colors it would be hard to make a grid that includes them all.

 

If you want to try something a bit less structured, you could try just putting a bit of paint out on some palette paper or cardstock and mixing it around in different combinations. I like to do this when I'm planning out how to paint a model, especially if it's a color I haven't done before.

 

Experimenting with colors for my smoky cream NaMoPaiMo model

Don't be afraid to experiment and try unusual combinations! You'll still learn something even if the mixture doesn't end up being the color you want. I plan on someday doing some posts that get more into color theory and talk about how some colors that aren't particularly 'horsey' on their own (like Manganese Blue Hue) can be useful for painting realistically colored models when used in the right way.

Manganese Blue Hue is also a really fun color to use on unicorns.