Painting Tips: Thinning your paints

Every one has done it. You have opened that paint pot, dipped your brush in, put it to model, and all the detail just disappears under a nice thick layer of paint, and you panic. I do it regularly, think I only need a spot, and then mess my model up.

What are the benefits of thinning your paints? You will not lose any detail in a model with correctly thinned paints, no matter how many times you have to go over the area. The paint will also dry a lot smoother, and there will be no brush strokes in the paint.

So what do you do to think your paints?

Method 1: Basically, you need a palette, a brush some water and the paint. Get some paint on your brush, and put it on the palette. Then using CLEAN (cannot stress that enough) water, use add it to the paint off the brush. Generally, one brush of paint to two brushed of water is where I want to be personally. Play around to get your own ratio. We are looking for paint the consistency of single cream, maybe a bit more watery that that.

Method 2: Go out to your local model shop, and see if they sell Vallejo Game Colour Thinner. This is basically a acrylic medium, and comes in a wonderful dropper bottle. Put your paint on a palette, add one drop of thinner, mix, add more if needed. Still looking for the single cream consistency, and usually (for me at least) 1 paintbrush of paint is thinned by 2 drops of thinner.

Now clean your brush before you start to paint, to get off excess paint, as any excess will defeat the point of watering down the paint. Before you put brush to model, wipe off excess paint on some kitchen towel.

You will notice that the paint may need another coat to get a good, solid covering on the model. This is OK, in fact wanted. 5 thin coats of paint is much better than 1 thick coat of paint. Yes it pushes painting time up, but also the paint dries a lot quicker like this, and you can see the colours emerge, and you have a lot more control over the paint.

One more method I sometimes use, especially with GW paints, is to thin down the whole pot at once, so you can paint out of the pot. Be careful with this, you don't really want to over thin the paint, as you can still use a palette/thinner later. I have used this on quite a few of my GW paints, they last longer and I don’t need to waste time thinning every colour every time I want to use them.

Sorry for the lack of pictures, I did take some but they really did nothing. I will make a video over the next day or so to show consistencies.