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Recently I had a look at the Warlord Games website. I was astonished to see a “complete” paint set on sale for £300, and another one (actually out of stock) for £600. My Premier League of high quality artist paints should cost in the region of £100. Money isn’t the reason I have gone down the mix-your-own route, but it is certainly much less expensive. This time I want to explain how I go about painting my miniatures, starting with those from the Horse & Musket era. This is the best place to start, as the process is very straightforward.

I have two Horse & Musket collections, and I’m starting a third. My biggest is 18mm Napoleonics, mainly French and Prussian, but I have a few old Austrians knocking around too; the other current collection is 6mm Great Northern War – Swedes and Russians. Both of these have been built up over many years, as my painting technique has evolved. My newest is 1866 Austrians and Italians. What I describe here should work for pretty much the whole era from 1800 until dull-coloured uniforms came into general use at the end of the 19th Century. It should work pretty well for earlier eras too – though there is more bare metal and that may need adjustments to technique. Also medieval heraldry is usually represented in bright colours, which might require an extension of my normal palette if you are painting heraldry items yourself, rather than buying in banners and decals, etc. I would still try to make them a bit duller than the norm, but that’s taste! And if you want to follow the fashion for painting ancient soldiers in unfeasibly bright colours, that is easy too, but you will need brighter pigments. The camouflage era I will cover in my next post. If you are after the traditional toy soldier look, you might have a need for some brighter pigments, but not outside my “second division”, except maybe some ultramarine blue – though in fact I think the Prussian Blue Hue would do fine. Fantasy figures may also need brighter pigments, depending on the aura you are trying to create.

Firstly, where do I mix my paints. I use a wet palette, a Daler Rowney Stay-Wet one. Wet palettes have come in for a lot of criticism from Ken Reilly in his popular Yarkshire Gamer’s podcast. He thinks that they are a gimmick promoted by the commercial hobby suppliers. I looked at the Warlords one on their website, and it does look a bit more engineered that the Daler Rowney version, though not that much more expensive. I find the wet palette very useful. My projects usually run in a series of two-hour sessions, which may take a couple of weeks elapsed time (alas projects typically take longer, but I don’t need fresh paint for the whole project). Virtually all the paints I use are mixes, and I might want to use the same mix at various points, and the wet palette helps keep these mixes on the go for the duration. Hobby paint mixes may not be needed for that long – and besides they tend to be runnier than heavy body artists acrylics. So perhaps Ken’s hatred of wet palettes is as rational as his hatred of round dice, rather than irrational as his dislike of coffee.

I use artist’s gesso as a primer, and I find acrylic flow enhancer useful to loosen up stiff paint – though often a touch of water is all that is needed. I do not use an airbrush on Horse & Musket era miniatures, though I have experimented with using it for priming – it’s still surprisingly hard to get the paint into all the nooks and crannies. I use oil paints for horses in 18mm – but I’ll come to that later.

My basic process is unremarkable. I prime the figures first, using a mix of gesso with a bit of student grade Raw Umber (which I have in industrial quantities thanks to a mixup by one of my suppliers). This gives a nice neutral dried light mud colour, which doesn’t mess up the paint layers placed on top (like dark primers do) and is relatively kind to coverage gaps. This goes on with a bigger and usually older brush – as the rapid technique I use is harsh on brushes. Like most wargamers, I don’t aim for painting perfection – the priority is to get presentable results quickly and in bulk; mistakes happen and aren’t always corrected. Next I usually mount the figures on their final bases at this point, setting them in a mix of acrylic medium, sand and a white and raw umber paint mix again (using student paints). I mount WW2 figures, mounted usually singly or in dispersed groups, before priming – but for closer packed Horse & Musket units I usually prime first. This is probably much earlier in the process than most people base figures – but there’s no point in painting things you can’t see, and I feel that basing first gives the result more unity (another unprovable assertion, of the sort commonly held by artists and hobbyists alike).

Next there is a base coat covering of the main uniform colour using a bigger brush – aimed mainly at where that colour is required, rather than the whole figure, but without worrying if it strays a bit. I also paint the bases now, in the same Raw Umber and Titanium White mix I have been using on primer and the sand/medium mixture, though perhaps a bit darker. Until this point I work on as big a batch of figures as I can – which might be 50 or even 80 18mm infantry figures. I might paint some other items at this whole batch stage – shakos perhaps, if they can be painted quickly, without too much accuracy required. After this I paint the detail with a finer brush, but in much smaller batches – 8 to 12 figures at 18mm typically. Once this is done I give the figures a wash or glaze, using a dark colour mixed with whatever medium I happen to favour at the time – at the moment with some matt varnish designed for airbrush use. Finally I do the bases by gluing on various mixtures of flock, sand and static grass. That’s more or less it – but do I go about mixing the colours?

Readers of this series so far will understand that my technique now is to use a series of dull and mainly old-fashioned pigments most of the time, and only use fancy bright ones occasionally. This resembles the approach of the old masters, before modern pigments were invented, rather than more modern artists from the Impressionists onwards. Still, modern colour-mixing theory remains very helpful.

I think about this in terms of three colour axes, being complementary pairs: orange-blue, red-green and yellow-purple. The orange-blue one is easily the most useful for Horse & Musket. It covers blues, browns and flesh tones. I do this almost entirely with four pigments (plus Titanium White): Prussian Blue Hue (or Indantherene Blue), Raw Umber, Raw Sienna and Burnt Sienna. Blues, blacks, greys and dark browns are made using the Raw Umber and whichever blue, plus white. For lighter browns, I use Raw Sienna (for more yellowy hues) or Burnt Sienna (for redder ones, including Caucasian flesh). For white I mix a bit of one of my brown mixes in with Titanium White. Sometimes this is all you need apart from the metallics for the shiny bits.

The red-green axis is used much less often, and I have found it a bit trickier to mix. You need this for greens and reds (obviously), and if your base coat is one of these, then I would use this for the blacks and greys as well. For bright red, I usually dull down Cadmium Red Hue with a bit of Viridian green, but go easy on the white – or else it turns a bit pink. Often the red is on small but higher impact features like facings – it can safely be brighter and more saturated; sometimes I use the Cadmium Red straight from the tube. Reds in uniform coats need more dulling down with Viridian, and a bit more white – and perhaps a dash of Yellow Oxide. This can look awful on the palette – but much better on the figure when placed alongside the other uniform colours. True red dyes were very expensive, so that used on all but the finest uniforms was a bit dull – typically made from madder. For greens my usual starting point is Sap Green, though sometimes greens are shown as being slightly bluer, and you might like to mix in a bit of blue (use a Cyan-like shade for preference, but Prussian Blue should work OK). The green can be cooled down with sparing quantiles of Cadmium Red, or rather more Venetian Red, or Burnt Sienna – and add a bit of white. As I have already said, I have had quite a bit of trouble with green – and some of my attempts have ended up a bit on the dark side – but Sap Green is a good place to start. For the blacks and greys Sap green is also probably the best place to start, and then add in Venetian Red or even Cadmium Red. Burnt Sienna might work too, though I haven’t tried this, and theory would suggest that wouldn’t create a true grey.

And then we come to the yellow-purple axis. The pigments here tend to be very hard to work with, and it is pretty frustrating if you try to follow the usual paint-mixing theory. Fortunately it isn’t needed much for uniforms. The difficulties with yellow and purple pigments extended to the dyes available in this era too, so they were used rarely. Having said that, a dark yellow (such as that achieved with Yellow Ochre) was used a bit, and Yellow Oxide is a good starting point for this. The olive green colour used for French artillery actually belongs here, even if your eye thinks it is closer to a true green. Use Yellow Oxide as a base, and mix in some Mars Black – and the usual white. This is, in fact, pretty much how the colour was made at the time (Oxide Yellow being chemically the same as Yellow Ochre). Austrian artillery was painted in yellow ochre – and this isn’t far off Yellow Oxide, though it is a bit too bright straight out of the tube. It needs the usual white, and I would try adding a very small amount black – though I haven’t painted any Napoleonic Austrian artillery since I took up paint mixing properly. (1866 Austrian artillery was varnished natural wood – though sometimes mistaken for the old ochre). For yellow facings, Yellow Oxide and white should be fine. This should work for most yellow uniform coats (sometimes used for musicians – and the Neufchatel battalion, of course) – but you can add in some Cadmium Yellow if you wan to zap it up a bit. For my 6mm Swedes I haven’t need anything more than Yellow Oxide. Purple comes up even more rarely than yellow. I would reach this by mixing Cadmium Red with Prussian Blue.

The wash or glaze applied after painting is an important consideration when it comes to colour. It is one of the quickest ways to lift painting results, and for me now replaces (almost) all efforts to highlight or lowlight using direct paint – but it does affect the overall colour. I have experimented with various things – Winsor & Newton peat brown ink, adding paint to water, and using diluted inks. I currently use Liquitex Airbrush Matt Varnish (which isn’t fully flat) with a bit of acrylic ink in it – something between a glaze and a wash. Remember your colour wheel here. A brown wash will deepen blues nicely, but distort reds and greens – though not necessarily in a bad way. Black darkens things more and can turn yellow into olive. The red-tinted Peat Brown will work well on greens and reds, but could be disastrous on pale figures (white uniforms or grey horses). If the wash turns out to be too heavy handed, I sometimes do some near-dry brushing with a suitable highlight colour on the raised bits.

Incidentally, if you want to mix your own highlights or lowlights, that’s very easy. There are three ways. First is to mix in a bit of white or black – but this is a bit colour distorting. The second is to use the colour wheel – mix a bit of the complement to lowlight (i.e go to the middle of the wheel), or a higher chroma version for highlights (taking it to the rim). The third is to use the colour wheel again to migrate the colour towards yellow for highlights or towards purple for lowlights (i.e. mix reds into blues or blues into reds). So far as I can see artists use all three methods according to situation/taste. Shadows are often represented as dull shades of purple.

And then we come to horses, which after all are one of the defining features of the Horse & Musket era. I paint these in large batches straight after basing – after first working out the numbers of each type – Bay (about half, perhaps more), Chestnut, Black, Grey and other. For 6mm and 10mm figures I use the usual acrylic paint technique, as described above. The bays and chestnuts mostly start with Raw Sienna or Burnt Sienna – though many of the bays in particular need to be darkened down with Raw Umber or Burnt Umber. The ubiquitous white needs to go in too. For blacks and greys I typically start with my dying tube of Payne’s Grey – but this is easily made using Prussian Blue and one of the browns to get a distinctly blue-grey. This needs variable amounts of white, from a lot (greys) to very sparing (blacks). Payne’s Grey is also used for the mains, tails and fetlocks of the bays. If you are quick and brave you can mix in a bit of blue with the brown on the horse while it’s still wet to get this – but acrylic dries fast.

For bigger horses – in my case 18mm, but the same logic works for 28mm – I have been converted to the oil paint technique, as may earlier attempts with just acrylics looked a bit flat. First you base coat the horse over the primer. You want something quite bright for all but the darkest horses. For Bays and Chestnuts I use Raw Sienna and Burnt Sienna with only sparing white mixed in. For darker horses use Payne’s Grey or Burnt Umber (the reddish hue works better here than Raw Umber) and white. The technique involves putting oil paint over this and, waiting until it’s a bit tacky. Advice on how long varies, and probably depends on the paint used – it needs long enough to stain, but mustn’t dry out; I tend to go quite quickly, 10-15 minutes, and try again if the results aren’t right. You then wipe the oil paint off, with a kitchen towel or bit of rag, leaving more paint in the recesses.

What oils to use? It doesn’t need to be great quality – I bought whatever was on cheap offer on my preferred online supplier. In my case this was Sennelier Rive Gauche Fine Oil. The main ones I use for horses are Van Dyke Brown and Payne’s Grey (not at all a satisfactory paint in this Sennelier version as the medium separates out in the tube and floats to the top), together with Zinc White. The two principal colours are old-fashioned mixes of the sort despised by modern artists – but they work in this context. The white needs to be mixed in to un-saturate; the undercoat should give variation between the more golden and redder coat colours. The Payne’s Grey works for black and grey horses, and for the mains, etc of the bays. To provide variation I also have some Raw Umber and Burnt Sienna to mix in. I now get satisfactory results for bays, chestnuts and blacks – but greys, roans, etc. are a work in progress. I have experimented with bright orange and bright red undercoats, but not with satisfactory results – and if you miss a bit they show up like fury. But the undercoat needs to be quite bright – and lighter than the oil overpaint. Painting horses is a whole art in itself, and I’m learning all the time – but a lot of fun too.

Is all the faff and extra expense of using oil paints worth it? Truth be told I don’t think the results are much better than would be achieved using normal paints. I still look at real horses in life and feel I’m not doing them justice, especially some of those the gorgeous chestnuts, to say nothing of greys. It’s been interesting working with a different medium, and I also use oil paints to create weathering effects on vehicles and aircraft.

If there is interest – I have no idea how many real people read this blog – I might do a photo demonstration of my technique, perhaps using some of the free 28mm plastics that I keep getting with the magazines. I didn’t do it this time as it would have added a good week or two to the publication time.

Next time – the camouflage era.

In Part 1 I said that a wargamer only needs a dozen artists’ pigments instead of scores of hobby paints. In Part 2 I said that pigments behave quite individually, and that you need to get to know them. This time I will describe the pigments I actually use. I will organise the 33 pigments in my collection these into three groups of 11: the Premier League – the top ones I use all the time; the Second Division (I know, I know, that’s not how the football league works) of the pigments I use occasionally but could probably do without if need be; and the Also Rans – the ones I have bought but don’t actually use these days.

But first I need to talk about replicability. One reason people might stick to ready-mixed hobby paints rather than mix their own is that they are worried that each time they mix a fresh batch it will look a bit different. This why I try to stick to a two pigments plus white rule for mixing. This way it isn’t too hard to replicate an old mix. Otherwise if a third pigment is used this must in a small quantity for a tweak. And anyway a little variation doesn’t matter – there is variation in life, after all. At one point I tried juggling three main pigments (in my initial efforts to get German Dunkelgelb), and this was indeed a nightmare. That affects the palette choices.

The next point is that unless I say otherwise, all the pigments I describe are from the Liquitex Heavy Body Acrylic range, where I use tubes of 59ml. I have found these to be constantly good and reliable paints – but the killer feature is that they come in the best designed tubes. The screw-top lids last for ever. Unlike Winsor & Newton or Daler Rowney, where eventually I tend to lose the whole tube because the top malfunctions, or I have some other packaging failure. This has never happened with the Liquitex Artists range – though this doesn’t apply to their Basics student-quality paint, which comes in cheaper tubes. Unless you are into bulk processing, a 59ml tube should last forever. My Cadmium Red Hue is over 40 years old, I think, and has been in regular, if sparing, use. I have had to renew only a few of my Liquitex paints (Titanium White and raw Umber, for example).

The Premier League

These are the pigments I can’t be without. If one of these gives out, I immediately replace it – though with Liquitex paints this has happened only a few times.

Titanium White. Almost everything needs a bit of white in it – only bits of detail that need to stand out, like facings perhaps, should be saturated. This is often where hobby paints go wrong, though I think that some manufacturers may be wising up to the problem. The scale effect – the idea that the colour needs to be paler the smaller the scale – is not uncontroversial, but the fact is that saturated colour is for advertisements, not representing gritty reality. So you need white pigment. Titanium White is the most versatile on offer – it is bright and opaque (a virtue in the hobby context, if not always for artists). There are alternatives, but they don’t make the Premier League. Incidentally I almost never use this by itself, as it is too bright. To represent white on a miniature it needs to be mixed with a touch of something (I use raw Umber most often) – unless for small dabs where strong contrast is needed.

Prussian Blue Hue. This is a lower-chroma blue, but actually a bit too bright to use directly for Prussian or French uniform coats. It is a mid-register blue, that mimics the colour from the standard indigo dyes well. This Liquitex paint is not pure pigment but behaves really well. It is the only blue to make it into my Premier League as it is the only one you really need. Mix with white to get paler, sky blue colours. Idantherene Blue is a decent alternative and is what I started with – and is in my Second Division.

Raw Umber. A low chroma mid-brown that I use all the time. Mix with Prussian Blue to get greys, and as close to black as you need. This is the place to start for most browns. I also use it a lot in primers, mixed with white gesso, and terrain (but not the artist quality stuff).

Yellow Oxide. This is the industrial age version of the ancient pigment of Yellow Ochre. Yellow is a difficult pigment, which often comes out thin and horrible. Yellow Oxide is bit duller and veers a little bit orange, but it is robust. It is my go-to yellow, even for facings (including for Swedish uniforms). It mimics the available pre-industrial yellow dyes well. It is also useful for more modern camouflage colours, from German Dunkelgelb, to Olive Drab (and the similar French Napoleonic artillery green).

Cadmium Red Medium Hue. Alas pigment with this name is not in the current Liquitex range – they have Cadmium Red Medium and Cadmium Free Red Medium. I think what I am using is the latter. It is the only high chroma paint in the palette, and is a lovely opaque pigment . You don’t need much – but sometimes you want your red to really pop, and this does the job. Otherwise you tone it down with a bit of green.

Raw Sienna. This is a beautiful orange-brown. When you need more chroma for than Raw Umber offers, this is where to go for yellower browns. I also use it as a basis for khaki.

Burnt Sienna. This is redder than Raw Sienna, and useful when you want a red tint to things (Caucasian flesh for example). I use it quite a bit for horses.

Permanent Sap Green. I’ve had more trouble with greens than any other hue, and I still do. This lower-chroma mix isn’t too blue and I have found it quite useful. Funnily enough I don’t need green that much, away from the olive colour that I get from Yellow Oxide.

Mars Black. Recently promoted to the Premier League. Monet always said that black should have no place on a palette. Totally saturated black rarely happens in nature – things just look black in context. The near-blacks we get by mixing Raw Umber and Prussian Blue, say, look fine on a miniature. And when mixing with true colour, it distorts the hue. But I have been finding more uses for it – especially mixing with Yellow Oxide to produce a wide variety of colours that are useful in the WW2 context. And sometimes you want a black very quickly – and you can just mix a bit of any unsaturated colour in to lighten it up a bit. Also you might want a neutral grey (e.g. for US WW2 aircraft) – best reached by mixing black with white. Mars Black is very potent, though – one of my most frequent mistakes is putting in too much in, which then forces you to put too much other pigment in.

Iridescent Rich Silver. I’ve not found metallic artist acrylic paint all that satisfactory for miniatures. I even experimented with a hobby paint – but that was worse. I have also found that silver doesn’t last as long as other paints in the tube. But it is very useful – usually mixed in with something else to give it a bit of body, except when representing polished metal, like sword blades.

Iridescent Bright Gold. As with silver, not wholly satisfactory – and often needs to be mixed with Yellow Oxide or Raw Umber to give it bit of oomph. But still necessary for most horse and musket miniatures, and doubtless earlier eras too.

Second division

The second division are pigments that I use regularly. Some I use quite frequently but could substitute with something else – or I might replace them with something different if they die. Others I are harder to substitute but I only use rarely.

Burnt Umber. The last of the quartet of classic earth pigments (the two umbers and siennas), it is redder than raw umber but also dark. It can fulfil the same general role – mixing with blue. But I don’t think it is quite as well-behaved, and mixes with Titanium White quite can come out looking not very nice. I used to use it quite a bit for horses, but I have since changed my method, using oil colours – where I use Van Dyke Brown instead. But that’s a whole other story.

Idantherene Blue. As noted above, this used to be my go-to blue. It’s a bit darker than Prussian Blue, but I recently bought a replacement tube (my old one was from Winsor & Newton and suffered a tube failure). I now use it for French uniforms, while retaining Prussian Blue for the Prussian ones. I don’t really think it makes enough difference to be worth it, but it keeps me amused.

Venetian Red (Daler Rowney). I have already said that I like to work with lower chroma pigments. But my go-to red, Cadmium Red Hue, is high chroma – and Burnt Sienna is a bit on the brown/orange side. Venetian Red is an old-fashioned dull red pigment that I have found to be quite useful, and which is more crimson than the Sienna. Apparently the old masters used to use it for flesh tones – but it is in fact too red for that for miniatures. Alas Liquitex don’t make it (or at least not under that name) and I have and my old Daler Rowney is suffering from cap failure and is slowly dying as a result – so I find myself avoiding using it. When it finally goes I’m tempted to try and find something to replace it.

Payne’s Grey. This is a classic mix, now, according to Wikipedia, often made by combining Burnt Sienna with Ultramarine Blue. It isn’t hard to mix this yourself, but the ready-mix is convenient on occasion. For miniatures it is popular to use for horses, either as an undercoat (it approximates to horse skin colour) or for black/grey horses – and this is where I mainly use it these days. Mine is an ancient tube from Winsor & Newton, which is about to die through cap failure. I used to use this quite a bit as a black, and to tone down blues – but nowadays I have other ways of acheiving this. Liquitex do a version these days, but I don’t think I will replace this tube after I throw it out.

Cadmium Yellow Medium. Occasionally I want a yellow that is higher chroma and with a truer yellow hue than Yellow Oxide – and this is what I use. It is probably the best of the brighter yellows – which tend to be thin and horrible. Its opacity is still pretty poor by the standard of most pigments. Using a mix largely based on this on WW2 aircraft can take several coats. It is probably better to use a true yellow when mixing greens too – though I’m no expert on this.

Azure Blue. This is a mixture from Daler Rowney. I bought it because I thought it would be useful to have a pigment closer to primary Cyan. I haven’t used it much – I get sky blues by mixing white with Prussian Blue. I have sometimes used it when trying to adjust greens – where I have found it to work well, to my slight surprise. I think there are several alternatives. I didn’t see anything that looked quite right in my preferred Liquitex range – though Cerulean Blue might work as well, as might their “Brilliant Blue”. I dislike Cobalt Blue (see below), which is a bit darker and redder.

Transparent Mixing White. Otherwise known as Zinc White. I use white a lot to reduce saturation, and this is mostly Titanium White, as do most artists. Zinc White is an alternative where opacity is not an issue – which it usually isn’t if white isn’t the base colour. I can’t say I have noticed much difference – except my impression is that it has a bit less punch – which can be a good thing. I’m not sure I would replace it if it died. I do use Zinc White as my standard white for oil paint which I use on horses, where opacity is not an issue.

Viridian Hue. I bought this because it was the recommended green in one of the first books I read on painting with acrylics. I found it a horrible pigment to work with – runny and thin, as well a being a bit too blue for most uses. I then read that it was a very good mixing pigment, and since had a tube in stock, I started to use it to mix with reds to get grey-greens (such as German Field Grey or Israeli Sinai Grey), where it works fine. So I actually use it quite a bit, but I wouldn’t buy it again, so it doesn’t make the Premier League.

Iridescent Rich Copper. I had an idea that I should be able to mix metallic paints rather like the normal ones – and copper provides the red. I do use it sometimes, but not very much.

Neutral Gray. This is straight mix of black and white. I used this quite a lot in the early days, but then stopped when my colour mixing got more sophisticated. I have started using it again for convenience – in mixes which require both black and white – and adjusting accordingly after the initial mix. There have been three applications: with Yellow Oxide to get Olive Drab (though typically needing more black), as a base for Neutral Grey on US aircraft (funnily enough – though it needs a bit more white if I recollect correctly), and with Prussian Blue for Prussian Napoleonic artillery – it’s a bit less faff than using white and Raw Umber. This was useful enough for me to replace the tube recently.

Unbleached Titanium. This is a recent acquisition when I wanted to top up a recent order – and I haven’t used it yet. Since reducing saturation is a constant, I thought this might be an interesting alternative to using white (after reading a write-up on the Jackson’s blog) – requiring a bit less sensitivity when mixing. It might even be light enough to use as a dirty white by itself.

The Also Rans

These are the pigments that are still in my studio but which I no longer use regularly, and which I could have saved myself some money by never acquiring.

Cadmium Orange Hue. (Presumably Cadmium Free Orange in today’s Liquitex range). The orange-blue axis is the most important mixing spectrum for horse and musket miniatures. I thought it would be useful to have a high chroma orange whenever the orange dimension needed a lift. But it’s rare you need anything brighter than Raw Sienna, and if you do, you can mix up an orange using Cadmium Red and one of the yellows very easily. This one stays in the box these days, but it’s possible I will use it occasionally. It handles in a perfectly friendly way.

Ultramarine Blue (Red Shade). On the same logic this was my high chroma blue. It’s a very powerful pigment and mid range to reddish bright blue – a delicious colour and quite a user-friendly paint, but in fact Prussian Blue is almost always bright enough miniatures purposes. And if I want to use a blue to create or adjust a green, I prefer to use something closer to Cyan – i.e. Azure Blue in my palette.

Quinacridone Magenta. After I got religion when I was first introduced to the art of colour mixing, I thought a powerful primary magenta would be useful. This is a modern organic pigment, and seemed to fit the bill. I have almost never used it. It might be quite fun to mix it with greens, but I’ve never seen the need. If I ever needed to mix Polish Pink I might start with this, as I have it already – but there are other ways to do this.

Phthalo Green. This Daler Rowney pigment was yet another result of my enthusiasm for high chroma colours on the various segments of the colour wheel. Like most of the others it now languishes. I could use it in place of the Viridian, but its higher chroma would probably make it harder to manage.

Permanent Yellow (Arylamide). My first yellow, from Daler Rowney, which I bought in the very early days. It’s a horrible pigment, thin and runny with very little opacity. Cadmium Yellow is much better – and if you are happy with lower chroma (which I usually am), then there is Yellow Oxide or Yellow Ochre.

Dioxazine Purple. Another pigment bought when I was looking for bright pigments to represent the main hues. Purple itself has very few applications in miniatures painting – and if you do need it, a workable lower chroma version is easy to mix. I found it quite difficult to handle when I tried mixing it with Oxide Yellow to dull it down, and gave up. I use Mars Black these days – after trying to mix a red and blue pigments to get something more controllable. However, when creating my own colour wheel I did get a beautiful, rich dark yellow-brown when mixing with Cadmium Yellow.

Cobalt Blue. This Daler Rowney pigment was one of my early ones – for use when I needed a rather greener and brighter hue of blue than Idanthrene. I found it to be a horrible pigment to work with, and used it less and less until I stopped.

Opaque Oxide of Chromium. Another one of my early Daler Rowney pigments – this is a lower chroma mid-hue green. It has an interesting consistency – quite dense, but easy to apply with a brush, and wonderfully opaque. It’s an ideal pigment to apply straight from the tube, which is what I did a lot of in the early days – this worked well on French dragoon coats, for example. But I haven’t opened it for years. Its consistency means that it is a bit harder to mix and the old fashioned cap is a bit intimidating. Incidentally the blue colour on the label is the result of aging – the yellow component of the ink used clearly wasn’t light-fast.

Cobalt Green. I bought this Windsor & Newton pigment when I was casting around for greens that I could use straight from the tube, subject to the odd tweak. It didn’t work for me. This was so long ago I can’t actually remember why – probably a bit on the blue side, and high chroma. There may have been a problem with the texture too. If my Viridian gives out it will probably work as a substitute.

ACRA Red Orange. Now sold as Quinacridone Red Orange. I bought this when looking for pigments that I could use with only small adjustments – I was looking for a red that could be used as a base for uniform coats. I actually used it quite frequently; it’s a bit dark for uniform coats, but this was readily rectified (at the time I mixed in a bit Yellow Ochre). I have since stopped using it. Its lower chroma means that it remains potentially useful – but the normal earth pigments seem to be cover this area well enough, without bringing in fancy modern ones.

Pyrole Red. I bought this at the same time as the Acra Red Orange, when I thought it would be useful to have an alternative to Cadmium Red. It proved pretty much indistinguishable, and so I have almost never used it. It turns out that this pigment was developed for Ferrari for use in its famous bright red cars – its virtues being its brightness and stability; its downside being expense. And I do remember it being quite pricy – but then so were the Cadmium Reds, including the “hue” version. Actually these days it is slightly cheaper than the other bright reds, but still expensive for acrylic pigment. As and when my faithful Cadmium Red Hue gives out, this pigment should be a perfectly decent substitute. It may yet have its day in the Premier League.

Finally there are a couple more pigments that used to be in my collection, but which have now expired – and which I won’t be replacing.

Daler Rowney Pale Olive Green. Olive is a useful colour in the hobby field, and this was one of my very first pigments. I got a bit of a shock when I opened the tube, though. It is very bright: it needs a lot of cooling down to be anything close to usable. I didn’t know how to do that in the early days – and later on, when I did, the question was why bother? The description “pale” is a misnomer. More recently I tried this out as a student grade paint for use in terrain – but found the same problem. I was a bit puzzled until I saw the modern Yellow-Magenta-Cyan colour wheel – which show the high chroma greens as being much lighter than in the traditional colour wheel – in the sense that yellow is lighter than blue.

Winsor & Newton Graphite Grey. I used this quite a bit when I realised that black was too dark to use directly on miniatures – how do you lowlight it? It was my usual substitute. Eventually it suffered cap failure and died, and there was no need to replace it. Now that I use a wet palette it is a trivial matter to mix something into Mars black, or create a dark grey from a blue-orange or red-green combination.

A bit of a long post today – but I hope it is of value to hobbyists thinking of using artists’ colours. It’s also a bit of a window in my evolving understanding of using artists paints.

Next time: Part 4: Painting Horse & Musket miniatures

Post Script. One of my commenters has reminded me of another colour in my original collection which has expired (tube failure, as usual) and was not replaced: Flesh Tone. I can’t remember who made this, except that it wasn’t Liquitex. Doubtless political correctness means that it would have to be renamed, as it represents the flesh of only a minority of people (i.e. Caucasian flesh). Daler Rowney Peach Pink might be it. I used it a lot, using for it exposed flesh without any further mixing – and frequent use is doubtless why the tube/nozzle broke. Since then I mix my own based flesh tone on a brown and white, usually with a little of something else (blue or red) to tweak it. This can be a little tricky, especially when I want to represent sunburned skin. Human faces and flesh are so important to us, and used to provide so much information to our brains, that we often can’t see the colour objectively. That said, as my commenter says, this mix can be a very useful mixing agent – as it is unsaturated and its basically brown colour is quite neutral. If you want to lighten something to create a highlight, this would work very well in most cases. And it could be a good starting point for lots of things. I’m hoping that my recently acquired Unbleached Titanium will fulfil this role – and could be a place to start for flesh tones.

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