Making My Own Contrast Paint - Part 2 - Paint

Here's the rest of it! Part 1 of the process went over the trials and tribulations of creating colors from inks and went over color theory to some point. That's irrelevant if you're using existing paints that you want to turn into contrast paints. Mostly. Unless you want to change up the colors. But go read that one if you're interested in my journey.

This is where you turn color into paint. I'm using 'color' to be generic about what is being used - inks, paints, pigments, whatever. Without color you end up with clear and that's not really helpful as a contrast paint.

Here's the two artist mediums you use to make paint. Notice I specify that they're artist mediums. You can get very similar things by the craft paint for less money but you get what you pay for. Save yourself headaches (more on that later) and get the artist grade products. Craft store brand is just fine and the stores tend to have coupons. You're not going to use a lot at any given time so it's a wise investment.

• Flow improver
• Matte medium

Flow Improver

This is exactly what it seems to be. This will thin out your mix and extend the drying time (bonus!). It's better than water in the respect that it has .. stuff .. that works with the paint medium instead of just thinning it out. Most of the time water works fine. For this, get some flow improver.

Matte Medium

This is the important one. This makes paint. It makes the resulting blend 'sticky' so it will work as paint. Contrast paints are a heavy wash rather than a true paint so the mixing is going to be different. This is where I had my problems.

Note - don't try to get around this one by using matte varnish. Let me explain why this one caused me a lot of issues because I was stubborn.

When making washes for terrain I like to use matte varnish. It works well enough to make things sticky and it varnishes at the same time. Contrast paint seemed similar enough that I could follow the same process. This is not true. The varnish isn't sticky enough and I couldn't get the viscosity right. That's why I gave up for a while before getting matte medium. Don't make my mistake.

Making Contrast Paint

OK! Here's the good stuff! In the page there's a link to a video that got me started. It's an interesting watch by an interesting creator but I won't double link it. The end result he found was equal parts ink, flow improver, and matte medium.

Well. That sounds simple enough. My confidence was high as I measured out drops.

The results? Not so clear cut.

My problem was viscosity. I didn't have a real bottle of contrast paint to use as a guide for what my end result was supposed to be. If I could only have tried it once I would know where I was having problems. ONCE! Alas with the pandemic situation and the lack of painting groups at my local game stores I didn't have the option to play with someone else's expensive paint.

I honestly didn't know how the paint was supposed to turn out. So I kept testing and testing and testing until I gave up in frustration. Then I sulked and went back to it. I had plenty of primed figures I could use for testing but I never could get it quite right.

I think I may have had it once but didn't paint them correctly so I considered it a failure. Maybe.

I finally gave in and bought the paint. My local game store was very limited in colors so the one I got I'll probably almost never use. I messed up there and should have gone to the store with more selection so I'd have a paint that wasn't so specific. But this store isn't doing great so I gave them the money instead. I'll figure out a use for the paint. Probably. The important thing is I could finally see the viscosity I needed.

I use my palettes to see how paint will look and react on miniatures. The vertical surface shows viscosity and opacity. If you don't use welled palettes keep a scrap of flat polystyrene for the same purpose. It helps if it's the same color as your standard primer but that's up to you. My helpful painting hint for the day.

The green arrow shows the actual contrast paint. You can see where it covers then creates a pool. That's what I needed. And that's what I got, as you can see from my own results around it.

The problem is that 1:1:1 doesn't work all the time. Color viscosity, climate, and just plain luck play factors in the process. So here's how I experimented to do what needed to be done.

Stupidity note. When I mixed up the bottles of color I added matte varnish and flow improver to them, hoping I could use them right out of the bottle or with very little change. As I stated before I used the wrong thing. But the combination of them made it similar enough to the inks that it worked. After the bottles are empty I'll fill them up with the ink mixes (if I think I need that much) and deal with the new proportions at the time.

Remember when you start that you're putting in 1/3 of the amount of the final mix. That's important if you only need a little. Since I was painting a bunch of figures this is what I did.

Step 1 - Matte Medium

Matte medium is the base for this so I figured I'd start with a fixed amount. The measurements are in drops. I started with 10 drops of matte medium

Step 2 - Flow Improver

This one will be a starter amount and adjust it based on what your color medium is. Inks are the thinnest so they'll need less flow improver. Pigments are the driest so they'll probably need more. So start with less.

Step 3 - Color

Add as much color as you did matte medium. Here's your 1:1 ratio you should be able to keep constant. You'll still tweak but at least you have a baseline. Mix well.

Step 4 - Test

Put a drop of color on a vertical surface and watch how it moves. If it runs, it's too thin. If it runs down into a blob without leaving color behind it's too thin. Remember you want it to move a bit then pool on its own.

By now it should be obvious. Adjust your mix using ONE drop of the appropriate medium and test again. You're in the adjustment stage now so don't overdo it. It's much better to slowly add more than to guess how much you need then find out just how wrong you were.

Continue testing until you get that result shown above.

Here's my final result. The yellow on the left figure is real brand name contrast paint. The skin is mine. You can see they're almost identical in terms of how they behave.

Using Contrast Paints

This is something I had to learn as well. These aren't used like regular paints. Trying to do that leads to disappointment and frustration. I know that.

First and foremost - don't use your good brushes for this. You don't need them and you don't want them to take the abuse they're going to get. Mild abuse but still abuse. The biggest potential problem is getting paint into the ferrule since you load the brush when working this way.

Buy yourself a set of decent synthetic round pointed brushes with decent size barrels. You do want to load the brushes but not too much. I'll get to that.

Step 1 - Fill your brush

This may take a few times to get a decent paint load onto your brush. You'll learn the balance but you want enough paint to make sure you can get the recesses filled but still be able to pull off excess with the point. So don't soak the poor things. Just load them well. This is where the potential for paint in the ferrule happens and cheap brushes take that worry away.

Step 2 - Dab it on

You're not actually painting at this point. Starting at a high point on the area do a dab/paint and watch the paint move. Then do the same thing in another similar area. This is where it gets weird as opposed to painting because gravity is involved and there's also wicking from paint already on the figure. Use the tip of the brush to pull off paint that's too thick and press to add more paint.

It's best to try this out on a couple of sample figures to get the hang of it.

Be very careful you don't overload these washes. They may look fine from the top but when you turn them over you find out where all that extra paint when and there's big glops of paint below. Those suckers are tough to remove. Even with good paint remover you'll be picking away at them. So less is more when doing this.

Step 3 - Refine

Don't overwork the paint but go over the areas and remove excess from recesses and paint over areas where it's too light. This is a final step since the paint is still very workable. After you're happy enough with it set it aside

Step 4 - Wait

The combination of mediums makes this a slow drying process. I leave mine overnight between coats. I know there's videos showing how to use contrast paints to finish figures in very short amounts of time but those are using the brand names and I don't know what their composition is. They probably do try quicker. But there's no harm in painting up one color on a couple of dozen figures and letting them sit. Then you do the next one, etc.

Also try to avoid the "I'll paint another color that doesn't butt up against the one I just did" thinking. You're going to smear the first one. No matter how careful you are you're going to end up touching the fresh paint. Accept that these are going to take a while and have other things to work on while they're drying.

Summary

As I stated earlier I wasn't a fan of using The Dip (that includes the Army Painter method) in the past. And I'm not saying I'll use this on a regular basis or as a main method of painting other models or armies. But for these models I find it a very useful way to get the style of painting I prefer with minimum effort.

Here's the end result of my skin experiments. I'm not sure that I need to worry too much about how the undercoat pools since the green is pretty dark and covers it up anyway. I'm still pondering putting a touch of the undercoat on the highlights of these when the time comes. It may or may not be needed and having a hoard army means there's a lot of models.

Making My Own Contrast Paint - Part 1 - Color

 

I've been kind of  hinting at working on a hobby project for far too long now. That's because I've been starting and stopping on it. Now that I think I've got it ready for prime time it's also ready for the blog.

I've split it into multiple parts because I know how wordy I get in these things. The less chatty and more 'technical' version will be a page that has necessary information. The blog posts are more the journey of how I finally got to where I was pleased with the results.

For those who don't know Contrast Paints are Games Workshop versions of a heavy wash, in their official colors that they use in all their various and sundry products. They're also expensive. For some reason I thought Vallejo had already put out their version of these but I can't find a reference so maybe I'm confused. Warcolours (a not very well known company that should be known better) created their Antithesis line which is the same thing. Army Painter is supposed to be releasing their own as well.

Obviously this has become a fast and popular way to paint. It's still just heavy washes tho.

I'm stubborn. Go figure. I'm already working as best I can not to give GW any of my money when it comes to making my ork army. I've done excellent so far. So of course I went on a search to find alternatives to buying their overpriced paints. I wasn't sure I was going to like them. I've tried painting using The Dip and haven't been happy with the results. I've always ended up stripping them and painting as usual.

In this case the more cartoon-like paint jobs I'd been seeing appealed to me. GW 40K orks are cartoon-like in general. They're the silly faction. That's what appealed to me, both in the models and in the way that they're played. So of course I wanted to give it a try.

YouTube is as it always is - a treasure trove of material for hobbies. I found a video (I'll link it in the page when it gets made) on making your own contrast paints. Actually I found quite a few videos but I like this guy's style and he goes into how he did his own testing. Plus I had the materials on hand. Kind of.

A heavy wash is made up of three things:

1. Color
2. Medium
3. Thinner

If you already have paint the colors you want then you're golden. Move on to the next part which is turning those into contrast paint/heavy wash. I'm going to chat about color here.

Color can be inks, paints, pigments, whatever. For the green skins I planned on using F&W acrylic artist ink because I have all those colors due to an excellent clearance at Hobby Lobby. That and the video shows him using inks so why not? I broke out the inks and dusted off my memories of color mixing.

One of the first things was that I kind of wanted to get close to matching the GW colors. The Paint Rack phone app - wonderful thing, download it and pay to unlock all the features - showed me that I had no paints close enough in value to use as a reference. Of course. Hundreds of colors and nothing was a close enough match. Good thing I had the inks and the internet.

I found someone who posted pictures of all the contrast paints and how they look on a finished product. I won't link to that, mostly because once I downloaded the pictures I didn't save the site. It's got how the paints look over all three colors of primer - white, grey, and black. I was only concerned about white since I wanted the brightest color I could get.

I wasn't just mixing one color either. As the picture at the top shows I needed two - the undercoat and the top coat. That's two experiments in color. I took my notes and counted my drops, then compared the results. I had a lot of things like this:

FYI - All those are rejected mixes. But it showed me the differences that resulted from using different green inks and the other colors I mixed into them. I did a lot of this. Ink is cheap and none of these have the artist mediums in them to make them anything but color testing. You can seen the beginning of the streaks where I tested them when they weren't a pool of color at the bottom. The palette well is angled so they did a nice transition from thin to thick on their own.

I was testing the ratios of green to yellow and different shades of both green and yellow. You can see that the results turned out quite different. It was a great way to relearn how colors work. I do have some books on mixing acrylics into thousands of shades but didn't refer to it (much) in this process. Instead I used my intuition and what I already thought I knew.

To cut to the chase I did find colors I liked for the pair. They're not the ones in the top photo either. I just liked that pose and how it showed both layers. The real results will be in a post showing off the full paint jobs. The final recipes will be in the post.

I needed other colors as well if I was going to do all contrast paints on these. Another video showed the results of that and I didn't mind the results. So more color testing.

I made a couple of other colors than this but you can see the two different browns. Yes. Purple and blue were used in making that brown. It's why they're on the palette, so I could have a reference back to them. Brown is a funny color and I'm not going down that rabbit hole here, especially since it isn't even a real color.

I made a black paint that is mostly Payne's Grey with a touch of black. Again, color mixing and theory here. Black is not a color. It's a tint. Payne's Grey is a very nice rich dark grey that's translucent. The black was to make it just a touch darker and to make it a little more opaque. That mix worked.

I did screw up with red. This is where I would have put a picture of the result but for whatever reason I don't have one. I swear I took pictures of all of the parts of the process. The screw up is I forgot how transparent red is. It's why it's so difficult to paint good red. When I put it on the mini I got a really weak and ugly result of some red in the recesses and a slight hint of pink on the highlights. This was not what I wanted. That's when I remembered the opacity problem and when I set the whole thing aside for a while.

Yellow has the same issues as red most of the time. Since ork yellow is any shade of yellow you want I didn't bother to mix a shade. The only reason I mixed a red was because I didn't like the straight red inks for orks. I felt it was too wimpy. I have not tried the yellow ink contrast paint so I can't say whether or not it's a problem.

After my sulking break I went back and resolved the issues with the paint itself. I do have my skin colors and mixed up bottles of them (that's another story) but also had been thinking about using more contrast paints on the mini itself. I'd been wavering between that and paint with a wash/glaze layer. I settled on contrast paints.

More color experiments! I took pictures of the colors then the resulting mix and how it looked when painted. These are small experiments - the palette wells are less than an inch across. 

The one on the left was supposed to be Brown 1, since any three colors mixed together become brown. They did not in this case.

Blue 1 is planned on being a slate blue, probably.

So. Blue 1 didn't turn out to be slate. This happens. It's a lovely shade.

The right is Brown 2, once again trying the concept of 3 colors equals brown.

Ok. Brown 2 isn't bad. It's a nice neutral-ish brown. I can deal with that.

Let's go wild with Brown 3! Primary colors baby!

Brown 3 is once again green. I'll talk about that below. I added another drop or so of red to see if I could shift it.

Brown 3 finally shifted into a brown. Kind of a brown. A very greenish brown.

Brown 3 gets more red! I wasn't going to let this color mix get the best of me. The excess of red made a reddish brown after moving out of the green range.

Going back to Brown 1 after seeing what red did for Brown 3.

OK. Let's not get into what shade we could name Brown 1.

Blue 2 is trying for the slate color again. Or maybe denim. That's Payne's Grey in the middle.

Too dark. More light blue into Blue 2.

Blue 2 as done as it's going to get.

This is where I stopped experimenting with color for other areas of the minis and decided that I would use my existing paints. I have all these colors so there's no reason to try to reproduce them except for the fun that was the experimenting. Don't get me wrong. Experimenting is fun and I'm glad I did it.

If you've got the materials and interest in what makes up colors then by all means have at. I could do this because I have all the ink colors. If I had to buy more of them I would have seriously considered just buying the paints given how expensive bottles of ink are, how little is used, and the unknown of what colors I needed. In the short term the actual paints would have made more sense. Probably the Warcolours paints but you never know.

Rather than show you painted minis here's the final colors I settled on for the ork skin. Ignore the white in the middle well - that's primer I used for touching something up. But the streaks up the side of the palette well in the middle are important later.

The Color Brown

The color brown is an interesting thing since it's not actually a color on its own. You won't find it on any color wheel and the art stores have the various shades in their own offset from the real colors. Brown is a muted orange. Yes, it's orange. Go figure.

Let that sink in for a bit. Brown isn't a color. Take a look at these two color range images and see if you can spot the overlaps. Once you see it you can't unsee it. You can thank me later.

I've been doing some color mixing and browns are part of that. You'd think it was easy - grab some form of raw and/or burnt umber, maybe add a color, done. Nope. It doesn't quite get that simple. Well, most of the time it is but only if you want a warm brown. Once you get into shades of brown it gets more complicated. Because brown doesn't exist on its own.

What brought about this post was me having made a mistake in my painting and needing to correct it without messing it up worse. In short I'd used an orange heavy brown where I shouldn't have done. The painting is too far along for me to want to strip and start over, especially since I've done that once before with these.

It turns out I hadn't actually mixed the type of brown I wanted. Or maybe I did and grabbed the wrong bottle. Of course I haven't labeled the bottles even now. The end result is a lot of places painted far more orange of a shade than I would like.

So the solution seems easy. Make a brown wash and fix it right up. Not so fast. That orange isn't going away. Putting a brown over it is a tricky business because then I'll have an orange undercoat and brown doing whatever it's doing on top of that. The wrong shade and tone of brown over that orange could easily make things worse instead of better.

I have a book on mixing colors for watercolor, acrylic, and oil paints. I've been referring to it as part of this overall project and I'm pleased to note that there haven't been many big surprises. I'm decent on my color theory. Maybe not great but for the projects so far I've had a handle on it.

But this one has been a stumper. I've continued painting while trying to figure out how best to fix this mistake I made with minimum effort. More will be made clear as to why the fix is slightly more difficult than it might seem. Bear with me.

Tonight I had a revelation. I was talking brown with someone else and it got me thinking of how easy and how difficult it is to make a brown using other colors. Pretty much take any three colors, mix them, and you'll get brown. It might not be a pretty brown but you'll get brown. More importantly you'll get shades of brown. Unless you've used a purple brown you really don't see what this means. Yes. I have purple brown paint. It's useful.

As I said earlier brown is just an orange kind of shade. I'm trying to take an orange heavy color and brown it down. The fog cleared a little and I realized what I need to do is take that same shade and add some color to it to make it more brown. It took far longer for me to reach that conclusion than it should have but I was sulking.

So what color do you add to orange to make it more brown? Orange is really just red and yellow so blue seems the obvious answer. Since it's the obvious answer I did some research in my handy book of color mixing to find out I was right in that it wasn't the answer. According to the book I need to add some mauve. Instead of blue I need a blue shading to red. In my mind that's going to make the end result rather red heavy (orange is red and yellow and I'm looking at adding blue and red) but it's worth a shot.

Tomorrow is the test. I'll use the same base color and add just a touch of blue. Blue is a very intense color and anything with a heavy yellow mix is not. Again, color theory. I won't get into yellows here but I will probably have a rant on them in the near future. Therefore anything I add needs to be done with a light touch. If the blue doesn't quite work out then a touch of red. I can play with this all I like since it only take a few drops to find out if it will work or not.

I don't have to make much note of what I'm doing here. I'll be mixing up a completely new brown to take the place of the mistake in the future. Of course I will take notes in case I really like the resulting brown so I can duplicate it, starting with the orange type color as the base. I always take notes now. So when I say I won't make much note of it I think I mean that I'm not going to make a chemistry experiment level kind of notetaking. More of a reference. I think. I don't know. I'll write something down at least.

I'm very curious to see if my knowledge of color theory will hold up in practice. It's easy to say that something should work and to see it in a book. It's quite another to look at it on the palette and then the mini to confirm it worked. I'll take the hit of painting these areas twice because it was my mistake in the first place.

And what happened in the first place? I used the color I had mixed up for rust as the brown. It's a lovely color for rust. It's not a lovely color for leather.

I'll end this on a more humorous note. 

Competition painters and people who are more into the whole color theory aspect of painting miniatures can get hung up on browns. Really hung up. One whole drawer of my paints are nothing but browns. Brown is a serious color, even if it isn't a color.

Way back when I got here I would hang out and paint at a local game store, which has sadly been closed for many years. Someone I considered a friend would be there painting as well. He was as into color theory as I am. He has to be. He competes. I just do it because I'm that picky. But we were on the same page when it came to picking colors.

Whenever we would start talking about browns the other people from the group would say "They're talking about brown again" and tune us out. They didn't have nearly the same level of interest as we did. That got shortened to "The brown discussion" when it would come up at the paint table. I remember those days fondly because we would spend a lot of time finding exactly the right brown for the color palette. Even then I was pretty good at picking the right family of browns for the project at hand, if I do say so myself.

The way it always goes

I joined the demo team for Reaper Miniatures because I love their paints and minis and I've been upgraded to running the paint events at my local store.  Since I'm doing demos and events anyway I might as well earn points for them, right?

They also have a ruleset for a miniatures game that uses their miniature lines.  Not a shabby idea and I've liked the game the few times I've gotten to play it.

I do have figures for armies for myself but I really don't want to subject them to the hamfisted local gamers on a regular basis.  With the points I had banked up and some advice from experienced players/demo team members I settled on the basic composition of a demo army:

Sergeant
4 swordsmen
2 archers
2 spearmen

Monster

I was on the fence about the monster but was persuaded by "They look cool on the table and bring people over to see what's going on."  Good enough for me.

I created my rosters and then placed my order for three demo armies (three different factions).  Which arrived yesterday.  Yay packages!

I started to sort out the minis so I had all the different factions separated and when I sat down to paint I could grab-and-go.  But something was odd about the elf figures and what ones were in the package.  I checked my order and found out that somehow I only ordered archers.  No swordsmen, no spearmen.  Hrm.  That ain't gonna work.

Oh well, I'll fix it with my next order and use the extra archers as giveaway figures to people who show up and play the game.  Not a big deal at all and what the points are there to be used for.

Which leads me to the "The way it always goes" part of this post.

Elves were the only faction with a defined color scheme right now.  I hadn't thought out color schemes for the two other factions, thinking I could do that while I painted up the elves.  (Note - I'm painting the demo armies in the same colors as my personal armies.)  Now all the figures I really can paint and complete are ones where I don't know what colors I want to use.

I went into a couple of online chats about this kind of thing and got ideas.  I looked at what other people used for those factions.  I know I don't want to use the colors that are used in the rule book as everyone seems to use them and it isn't required to use any particular color.  Plus, I don't have a personal army for one of the factions.  So that color scheme has to stand alone and not be similar to any of the other ones.

I'm hoping to spray some primer on some minis to use as test subjects for the color schemes.  Then I can have the dual satisfaction of seeing how the color scheme works and getting a mini painted.

By the way.  The faction I'm working on first is the Crusaders so it's a lot of guys in armor.  Armor is easy for fast painting.  They have the flowing skirt-things (tabards or some such) to soften them up a bit.  I'm looking at ivory as the main color for those, accented with a light green.  And then the armor being mostly gold/brass/bronze.  My original scheme had a brighter, warm green instead of the light green but when I looked at the figures it would have put the green and gold too close for comfort and made me think of the Green Bay Packers.  Not a totally bad thing but not what I wanted on my gaming table.  Plus the other faction that I did order correctly is Overlords which is more guys in armor.  They're getting silver armor (I have a personal army of those but haven't settled on a color scheme.  I'm thinking orange.  Maybe.) and I needed the other set of armored dudes to contrast on the table.  Otherwise it would have been rather confusing and monotonous.

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