I have long been meaning to share my journey on the use of paint in the hobby. I am in a small minority that use artists’ paints rather than hobby paints. I have thought of trying to compose something for publication in one of the magazines – but I think it is best to start here, with something a bit less tightly edited. It will take more than one article. In this one I will set the scene by recounting my journey. I don’t expect to make any converts – but if I do, I can save them a lot of trouble. But a lot of what I have learnt will help anybody that uses paint in the hobby.

But first: why? The problem with hobby paints is that they encourage a painting-by-numbers approach. Hobbyists look for the exact shade they need straight out of bottle. Hobby paint providers enthusiastically cater for this market, and in no time hobbyists build up stocks of scores of paints. One manufacturer even provides separate products for highlights and lowlights – encouraging you to buy three bottles instead of one for any bulk application. Contrast this with the artist’s approach: a typical “palette” has no more than ten different “pigments” – from which all the multifarious hues on a painting are composed. Often palettes are even more restricted that that. A hobbyist needs no more than a dozen different kinds of paint for anything they are likely to do using the artists’ approach. A 59ml tube of Liquitex Heavy Body Acrylic (the sort I like best) costs about £7, and lasts forever. Vallejo hobby paints (the brand leader) comes in 17ml bottles costing £3. Even assuming that 17ml is enough to last for ages too (you should need to use less of each paint), you are likely to acquire way more than three dozen. In fact I have over 30 tubes of artists acrylic pigments – but half of them I rarely use. That’s all part of the journey that I wish to share – you don’t need as many pigments as you might think at first.

Then there is something else: mixing your own colours – which is what using artists’ paints is all about – gives you control and understanding. You break out of the prison of hobby conventions and scouring forums and articles for recommendations of what is the right colour for French dragoon coats, for example. You then start looking at the world in a different way, with a much greater understanding of colour. Hobbyists tend to make basic mistakes – typically using over-saturated colours. I might add that mixing your own gives more variation and “life” to your creations – though that is a hard point to prove. Having learnt almost entirely the hard way, it has been a long journey for me. But an enjoyable one – and I wouldn’t dream of going back to hobby paints.

I started the hobby in the 1970s (or even 1960s if you count making Airfix kits), with Airfix models and plastic soldiers. Back then I did what almost everybody else did – I used Humbrol enamel hobby paints. Humbrol brought out a range of “authentic” colours – which allegedly matched the actual colours used – I think they did a special green for those French dragoons – and I became addicted to these. I owned probably approaching one hundred of the little tins. I only recently threw them away, apart from the one tin of gloss varnish in the picture.

My wargaming came to an abrupt halt in 1979. I graduated from university and started training as an accountant. Furthermore, my parents moved out of London (where I was working), leaving me to live in a series of bedsits and one-bed flats. I didn’t have room or the time to pursue the hobby in any serious way. That changed in 1984 when I at last bought my own flat (at the age of 26 and without parental assistance – how times change!). I now had the space to pursue a hobby I had never forgotten. But I decided to do things differently. For a start I was going to use 15mm metal miniatures (starting with Minifigs). I also decided to start using acrylic paints, to complement and the eventually take over from the enamels. I had read a lot about how acrylics were the better than those nasty smelly enamels, and so I decided to make the change.

But what I thought people meant by “acrylics” was the artists paints I saw on sale at W.H Smiths – not the hobby paints that people were doubtless actually referring to. So my whole journey started on a false premise. I actually started experimenting with these in the 1970s, but I became more serious in the 1980s and used them more and more. It was not especially satisfactory because I still had the hobbyist mindset. I was expecting the colour coming out of the tube to be pretty close to the end result. I started to acquire lots of different pigments. But that is not what artists’ paints are for. It took me an incredibly long time to grasp this, but once I did, my outlook was transformed.

How I used to think was something like this: all things have a colour; when painting a model or miniature the idea is to replicate this colour as closely as possible; you then look for a paint that gets as closely as possible to this and tweak as necessary. This is complicated only slightly by such ideas as the “scale effect”, which says that smaller scale models should be paler to replicate the effect of atmosphere on viewing at distance. You simply mixed in a bit of white if you wanted to reflect this. Artists have a completely different approach. They start with the end effect they want to achieve, allowing that this has a strong subjective element (or in the case of abstract art – 100% subjective). It is not a question of accuracy, but whether it looks right. Colour isn’t a property of the object you are depicting – it is how your brain interprets the information from your eye. The colour when viewing that object close up under neutral light (however you define that…) is only one factor. Things look different, for example, when viewed on a cloudy day than they do in bright sunlight. They then construct this colour from a small number of paints – the “pigments” – which they call a “palette”. The pigments represent colours with a chemical simplicity, or simplicity of source. (This isn’t entirely true though – there a re some mixed pigments in use, like Payne’s Grey, and modern manufacturers make “hues” which are mixes to replicate traditional pigments which are not widely produced any more due to toxicity, etc.) This is a world away from hobby paints, which are ready-made mixtures of pigments to achieve a particular colour.

For me the penny didn’t really drop until I bought a book on how to mix paints. It was one of those great moments of revelation. A whole new world opened up. Alas I overdid it. I rushed out to buy yet more pigments, to cover parts of the colour wheel that were missing. Many of these, a purple and a magenta for example, I have barely used. There are important differences between how artists and hobbyists use colour, which affect the hobbyist’s palette. The first is the question of vibrancy. This is a quality artists often seek, and it is why they chase bright pigments, and mix these with care. But, unless they are going for the toy soldier look, wargamers rarely chase vibrancy. They seek a sort of authenticity of presentation that reflects weathering, cheap dyes and camouflage. In ancient and medieval times, bright dyes were expensive and the preserve a small elite. The bulk of the soldiery used cheap and dull dyes, or undyed cloth. These then got even duller as people lived in their clothes in the great outdoors, exposed to rain or sunlight, to say nothing of mud and dust. This was followed by a brief age where most uniforms were designed to be bright – in the 18th and 19th centuries – but even here the problems with dyes and weathering persisted. There may have been a brief moment towards the end of the 19th Century when advances in chemistry allowed cheap, bright dyes. But by this time camouflage was coming in: soldiers and their equipment became deliberately dull. And there’s another factor: we want an outdoorsy look to our gaming tables, and that dulls things down too – a matter of lighting and atmosphere. All this makes the job of a wargames painter much easier than for the typical artists – though, of course, that depends on the art being created. Artists complain that if they get their mixing a bit wrong they end up with something looking like mud; for a warmer variations on mud is often what they seek. Things are also quite easy for hobbyists looking for the toy soldier vibe: the colours are bright, but they are also simple. This highlights another difference between the hobbyist and the typical artist: the quest for exactitude. Artists are not after the false exactitude of accuracy, but they often care deeply about the precise hues of the colours they create, and especially how they bounce off each other in a particular composition. This really isn’t worth hobbyists worrying about. A degree of consistency across a wargames table improves the appearance – but getting the reds, greens and khakis exactly “right” matters little. I once tried devising mixes for the three (or is it four?) types of red in use by the Prussian army for facings. But I really couldn’t tell the difference on an 18mm figure at arm’s length.

Now I was fully converted to an understanding of colour, and at time when my hobby painting activity started to take off with my early retirement. Firstly I applied the new found knowledge to Napoleonics. This was, and is, a good place to start, as the colours are very basic. I found I could paint a French infantryman with just four pigments: Titanium White, Raw Umber, Cadmium Red and Prussian Blue. That included the black shako and the flesh. Not quite true: I still needed the metallics of silver and gold for some of the details. I only needed the red for the facings (though it also helped with the mix for the face) – and having one of the lighter brown Siennas to hand was helpful (in point of act I could have replaced the Raw Umber with one of these Siennas entirely – but some of the mixes would be a bit more difficult).

With my confidence built on Napoleonics, I broke into WW2. When I embarked on the journey, I had always considered this too difficult. But by the time I reached my first WW2 project, some German vehicles in 20mm, I was too far gone. I was not going to be dependent on some paint manufacturer’s interpretation. Dull colours are complex ones – involving all three primary colours in relatively high proportions. Small tweaks to the colour mix have a big impact, and can take it in completely the wrong direction. So it proved. I made several attempts at German Dunkelgelb before getting something I found acceptable. And even that first attempt, on some Panzer IIIs, looks to my current eye as being closer to the German desert colour Braun than Dunkelgelb – which as it happens was just as appropriate fro a Panzer III in 1943. But slowly I have got the hang of it. I have even got as far as painting WW2 aircraft, though my first attempt at RAF desert colours was not entirely successful.

It’s been a long journey, and I’ve learnt a lot. Above all I have achieved an understanding of colour, and a sense of control over the whole process.

Next time: colour theory