I'm an illustrator who got into model making recently and using artist-grade paints like this is a no-brainer to me. He's right about these paints being better than hobby paints like citadel because they are high quality paints that are made to last centuries for art collectors. HOWEVER, unless you're a serious artist who already knows how artist-grade paints work, you will need to spend *A LOT* of time learning how to mix colors. The learning curve for these paints is very steep compared to using hobby paints. Not all yellows mix with blue and make the perfect green and not all greens work the same way when painted onto a surface (as seen in this video). These are little nuances that take many months and even years for artists to learn until it becomes second nature to us. I don't say this to intimidate anyone. It's fun to paint once you get the flow of it, no pun intended. I already memorized dozens of mix formulas having many years of practice behind me. Just know what you're in for when you buy paints like this.
Thanks for this. I got my first set of miniatures and was looking into what I needed. Found myself very confused why no one was mentioning using artist paints. I have hundreds of dollars worth of artist acrylics and could not figure out why I seemingly couldn't just use those and not spend even more money on "hobby" paint. This settles me not spending even more money and just using what I already have. I feel like as long as you understand the properties of your artist paints, what you need to add, and how to mix colors, it's actually a better option for some.
Painter here: "miniatures" paints seem to be a joke I don't understand. Add medium or water to artist-grade acrylic paint. Transparency is a plus because the subject is the size of a walnut and it's not an issue to do many thin washes. Done!
Warning - I am not an artist, the things i am writing are just my own research over the last week: The thing to keep in mind is artist paint sets are made for mixing. By mixing a few colours you can make pretty much any colour - for example printers only use Cyan / Magenta / Yellow / Black (and white from the paper itself) and can produce the box art for the minatures you are painting. Minature paints are just pre-mixed paints. With some high pigment soft body artist paints and acrylic medium, e.g. liquitex airbrush medium for thinning, you can mix any colour you want to whatever consistency. Use water for washes when you want the paint to stay in recesses. Minature paints are more of an overpriced convenience item. If you have the time to learn how to mix paints you'll only need less than 10 paints, Example Pallete: Pyrrole Red, Hansa Yello, Ultra marine blue, titanium white, charcoal black These would be the bare minimium, so you have a red yellow and blue. Some colours you try to mix will come out muddy. E.g. if you mix ultra marine blue and yellow it will make a muddy green. This is because colours tend to be warm or cool and lean towards another colour. You can see if a colour is warm or cool by adding a bit of white. Since Ultramarine is a warm blue -- it is more reddish -- mixing it with yellow produces a red+blue+yellow = brown. To get around this you can add cool reds and blues to your pallete, e.g. quinacridone Magenta and phthalo green blue shade. That way you'll palette will be able to make brighter purples and greens.
You should try oil paints. The work flow is better in my opinion. Especially when you work Alla Prima (Wet on Wet) and the miniature is the secondary palette. Also you can put paint on and start a blend, make dinner and finish that blend 2 hours later.
It's all fun and games until a single strand of your dog's hair gets stuck to your mini while you let it dry and cure then you notice it when its solid and too late!
Use a dry pallet , or even a pop it as a pallete. You can also buy little bottles and shaker balls and pre mix a larger quantity. Also so flat is the matte line. But you can all your spray a matte varnish.
I just want to say that I think you have high quality content and I expect your channel to grow in the coming years. Thanks for the content it helped me out.
It's easy to add matte medium to change the finish, and opacifiers (chalk or barite) to alter the level of transparency. Added opacifiers are the difference between watercolors and gouache. Golden Fluid Acrylics are fabulous, IMO. As I run through my heavy body paints, those colors will be replaced with their fluid versions. They can always be beefed up using their gel mediums. You might really like using some of their texture mediums for areas on your pieces.
I’m a fairly longtime viewer of your main channel, and I also have recently gotten into miniatures, I totally love this content, very informative and entertaining! Keep it up!
You should try Nova Color paints they are just as fluid and are less expensive than Golden Fluid but just as high if not higher in quality since they make all their paints in small batches. Its a small company that's been making their stuff since the 60's. They mix their own pigment acrylics and they ship out of California, they even have a few bundles, or if you know which colors you already want they sell 4oz bottles for cheap, if you don't know what colors are which you can always get a sample swatch which has the actual paints they mixed, brushed on the paper to show you. A lot of muralist in LA use them and I have personally used them when I work on my paintings.
Thank you. I’m a big advocate to mixing my own color. I knew that the high flow were like Vallejo and GW citadel. Cheaper but over quality and qualified paint for miniature. 4.99 for 12ml vs. $-9 for 1oz(29.57ml)
HAHAHAHA my art instructor mentioned 'cheating' at model painting night by bringing her golden fluid paint. Glad you caught on. I hate the smell of acrylic paint retarder. Try using Golden's Open line of paint, which is preformulated to slow dry. Consistency is a (very) soft body, not fluid, but you miniature painters might actually enjoy it, and if not add water/medium I've never tried it, but Golden Fluid is also supposed to be fine enough to go through a mister bottle, we were talking about improvising one to replace those paint airbrush things you guys use ;) Quinacridone = kwin-ACK-ridone
Tri-Art Manufacturing out of Canada makes a lot of Fluid acrylics. Great consistency, largest selection of transparent pigments. My paint shelf is now full of Tri-Art, Golden, Holbein, and DaVinci fluid acrylics. I'll never go back to Citadel or Vallejo. I will continue to use the Army Painter Speed Paint Metallics though
jo sanjo matte flow acrylic heavy bodys are great when mixed with a bit of their magic mix and some water. also i am pretty sure that they dont have any toxic compounds so the brush lickers can enjoy!
Hmm depends if you want to do NMM on them or not. I personally am very bad at NMM. Working on it though. A good metallic primer might be a good start. Paint brand shouldn't matter a lot. Just pick up colors you like and if you want to keep it consistent keep to a single brand (also shoot for dropper bottles over pots IMO). Vallejo has a good starter kit if you are unsure 90% of my paint jobs are done with this set: amzn.to/3uoWOTa
could you mix lets say YOUR ORK GREEN and put in a dropper bottle for use when you need it? Grab you some SOFLAT by the same brand your using.. you'll LOVE EM! Also invest in some INKS, you can use them to help tint your other paints, and make washes.
Army painter is a decent brand to pick up, they have some fairly good metallics, their speed paints are pretty good, and I prefer their white over Citadel’s white (because it sucks), on top of that the paints are cheaper at $3 or so a bottle
Soflat paint by golden blows for minis it applies horribly even if thinned. Flow from them might be worth something but I'm going pro acryl now. Maybe one day I'll look into the flow series by golden but not atm.
Golden is painters paint. It doesn't have some of the properties that you get in a miniature paint. I think it gets confused for mini paint from the branding though. For example game color from vallejo has a varnish which will keep the paint from rubbing off with repeat touching. These paints lack that so you need to varnish it. texture wise it's not like mini paint either.
▶ Paints featured:
Vallejo Acrylics starter set: amzn.to/3uoWOTa
Golden Fluid Acrylic set (more useful than the one featured): amzn.to/3Fr7wPy
Golden Primary colors:
cyan/blue: amzn.to/3F2r9ff
Red: amzn.to/3XTBx1r
Yellow: amzn.to/3umY7C7
Magenta: amzn.to/3EYhBlz
Black: amzn.to/3urbAci
White: amzn.to/3HanTRO
Burnt Sienna: amzn.to/3gWLpqL
I'm an illustrator who got into model making recently and using artist-grade paints like this is a no-brainer to me. He's right about these paints being better than hobby paints like citadel because they are high quality paints that are made to last centuries for art collectors. HOWEVER, unless you're a serious artist who already knows how artist-grade paints work, you will need to spend *A LOT* of time learning how to mix colors. The learning curve for these paints is very steep compared to using hobby paints. Not all yellows mix with blue and make the perfect green and not all greens work the same way when painted onto a surface (as seen in this video). These are little nuances that take many months and even years for artists to learn until it becomes second nature to us. I don't say this to intimidate anyone. It's fun to paint once you get the flow of it, no pun intended. I already memorized dozens of mix formulas having many years of practice behind me. Just know what you're in for when you buy paints like this.
Helpful thank you! 🙏
Thanks for this. I got my first set of miniatures and was looking into what I needed. Found myself very confused why no one was mentioning using artist paints. I have hundreds of dollars worth of artist acrylics and could not figure out why I seemingly couldn't just use those and not spend even more money on "hobby" paint. This settles me not spending even more money and just using what I already have. I feel like as long as you understand the properties of your artist paints, what you need to add, and how to mix colors, it's actually a better option for some.
Painter here: "miniatures" paints seem to be a joke I don't understand. Add medium or water to artist-grade acrylic paint. Transparency is a plus because the subject is the size of a walnut and it's not an issue to do many thin washes. Done!
Warning - I am not an artist, the things i am writing are just my own research over the last week:
The thing to keep in mind is artist paint sets are made for mixing.
By mixing a few colours you can make pretty much any colour - for example printers only use Cyan / Magenta / Yellow / Black (and white from the paper itself) and can produce the box art for the minatures you are painting.
Minature paints are just pre-mixed paints.
With some high pigment soft body artist paints and acrylic medium, e.g. liquitex airbrush medium for thinning, you can mix any colour you want to whatever consistency. Use water for washes when you want the paint to stay in recesses.
Minature paints are more of an overpriced convenience item.
If you have the time to learn how to mix paints you'll only need less than 10 paints,
Example Pallete:
Pyrrole Red, Hansa Yello, Ultra marine blue, titanium white, charcoal black
These would be the bare minimium, so you have a red yellow and blue.
Some colours you try to mix will come out muddy.
E.g. if you mix ultra marine blue and yellow it will make a muddy green.
This is because colours tend to be warm or cool and lean towards another colour. You can see if a colour is warm or cool by adding a bit of white.
Since Ultramarine is a warm blue -- it is more reddish -- mixing it with yellow produces a red+blue+yellow = brown.
To get around this you can add cool reds and blues to your pallete, e.g. quinacridone Magenta and phthalo green blue shade.
That way you'll palette will be able to make brighter purples and greens.
Good comment. Thank you :)
You should try oil paints. The work flow is better in my opinion. Especially when you work Alla Prima (Wet on Wet) and the miniature is the secondary palette. Also you can put paint on and start a blend, make dinner and finish that blend 2 hours later.
It's all fun and games until a single strand of your dog's hair gets stuck to your mini while you let it dry and cure then you notice it when its solid and too late!
@@godzillarolls1613 yeah I have that problem too. My dog loves to shed and his hair gets everywhere.
Use a dry pallet , or even a pop it as a pallete. You can also buy little bottles and shaker balls and pre mix a larger quantity. Also so flat is the matte line. But you can all your spray a matte varnish.
I just want to say that I think you have high quality content and I expect your channel to grow in the coming years. Thanks for the content it helped me out.
It's easy to add matte medium to change the finish, and opacifiers (chalk or barite) to alter the level of transparency. Added opacifiers are the difference between watercolors and gouache. Golden Fluid Acrylics are fabulous, IMO. As I run through my heavy body paints, those colors will be replaced with their fluid versions. They can always be beefed up using their gel mediums. You might really like using some of their texture mediums for areas on your pieces.
I’m a fairly longtime viewer of your main channel, and I also have recently gotten into miniatures, I totally love this content, very informative and entertaining! Keep it up!
You should try Nova Color paints they are just as fluid and are less expensive than Golden Fluid but just as high if not higher in quality since they make all their paints in small batches. Its a small company that's been making their stuff since the 60's. They mix their own pigment acrylics and they ship out of California, they even have a few bundles, or if you know which colors you already want they sell 4oz bottles for cheap, if you don't know what colors are which you can always get a sample swatch which has the actual paints they mixed, brushed on the paper to show you. A lot of muralist in LA use them and I have personally used them when I work on my paintings.
Thank you. I’m a big advocate to mixing my own color. I knew that the high flow were like Vallejo and GW citadel. Cheaper but over quality and qualified paint for miniature. 4.99 for 12ml vs. $-9 for 1oz(29.57ml)
they also have wet palettes that help the paint last for a very long time. I haven't tried it yet but I got one.
Hey dude. How do you find these are in terms of durability for gaming pieces? Are they a bit less hardy than miniature paints?
HAHAHAHA my art instructor mentioned 'cheating' at model painting night by bringing her golden fluid paint. Glad you caught on.
I hate the smell of acrylic paint retarder. Try using Golden's Open line of paint, which is preformulated to slow dry. Consistency is a (very) soft body, not fluid, but you miniature painters might actually enjoy it, and if not add water/medium
I've never tried it, but Golden Fluid is also supposed to be fine enough to go through a mister bottle, we were talking about improvising one to replace those paint airbrush things you guys use ;)
Quinacridone = kwin-ACK-ridone
Tri-Art Manufacturing out of Canada makes a lot of Fluid acrylics. Great consistency, largest selection of transparent pigments. My paint shelf is now full of Tri-Art, Golden, Holbein, and DaVinci fluid acrylics. I'll never go back to Citadel or Vallejo. I will continue to use the Army Painter Speed Paint Metallics though
jo sanjo matte flow acrylic heavy bodys are great when mixed with a bit of their magic mix and some water. also i am pretty sure that they dont have any toxic compounds so the brush lickers can enjoy!
YOU HAVE A NERD CHANNEL!?!? immediately subscribed
Acrylic gouache in the form of Liquitex or Golden "SoFlat" is even a step up from this!
So what paints would you recommend for Necrons?
(I’m planning on creating a custom Necron Dynasty)
Hmm depends if you want to do NMM on them or not. I personally am very bad at NMM. Working on it though. A good metallic primer might be a good start. Paint brand shouldn't matter a lot. Just pick up colors you like and if you want to keep it consistent keep to a single brand (also shoot for dropper bottles over pots IMO). Vallejo has a good starter kit if you are unsure 90% of my paint jobs are done with this set: amzn.to/3uoWOTa
Holbein Acrylic Gouache (it's the water proof line and cheaper than the true gouache)
could you mix lets say YOUR ORK GREEN and put in a dropper bottle for use when you need it? Grab you some SOFLAT by the same brand your using.. you'll LOVE EM! Also invest in some INKS, you can use them to help tint your other paints, and make washes.
I use dollar tree paints and i have no issues with them
😂
Army painter is a decent brand to pick up, they have some fairly good metallics, their speed paints are pretty good, and I prefer their white over Citadel’s white (because it sucks), on top of that the paints are cheaper at $3 or so a bottle
Army Painter is bottom of the barrel paint.
@trisbane4086 That was true but is no longer the case with the new line.
Very good video, very relatable thanks keep up the good work
You should try ak interactive's enamel paints they have worked Well for me
In the UK, on Amazon....10 x 30ml paints = £93.99....a touch on the pricey side of the hobby!!
Soflat paint by golden blows for minis it applies horribly even if thinned. Flow from them might be worth something but I'm going pro acryl now. Maybe one day I'll look into the flow series by golden but not atm.
I use soflat all the time, it has become my main paint for miniatures. It's truly awesome, very rich in pigment and blends like a charm.
I use Soflat as my primers because of how matte they are. 😅 Then I use inks and oil for the rest.
😮 nice one!
light fastness is why the pictures of hamburgers in the window of the DQ look blue.
golden paints sound like scale 75 artist line. They also use single pigments but these have a matt finish.
Yeap! Scale 75 is doing exactly that with the artist line. I need to get my hands on some to try it.
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The title doesn't make sense since. Aren't the paints you're promoting miniature paints?
Golden is painters paint. It doesn't have some of the properties that you get in a miniature paint. I think it gets confused for mini paint from the branding though. For example game color from vallejo has a varnish which will keep the paint from rubbing off with repeat touching. These paints lack that so you need to varnish it. texture wise it's not like mini paint either.