The Colouful and Wide World of Paints

Over the last year, I've been experimenting with airbrushing since acquiring a cheap second hand Tamiya Sprayworks air compressor and spray gun set that had only been used once before. It's a wonderful device but requires that you constantly clean the spray gun after using it lest the paint dries and clogs up in it. Still, the even coats with the excellent finish are well worth all the effort to keep the sophisticated device clean. Now we come to the core of my ramble: Paint. Ah, paint! A modeler's bread and butter for customising or making their models and other toys look more accurate. To weather or make their model look fresh off the assembly line. But it's also not necessarily the easiest aspect of building your toy. The type of paint you use is important. There are many types, and the two most common are enamel and acrylic. Oil and water based paints respectively. To be honest with you, I absolutely enjoy using acrylic. They're easy to work with and cleaning up so easy. Fixing errors, which usually involve stripping all the paint off, is also a breeze. Acrylic thinner and the bulk methylated spirits I use to clean my brushes and the spray gun are less pungent than the enamel thinner and turpentine that enamel paints need. However, enamel paints are well established and I must admit that they can look very good when done right. They are unfortunately (or should I say fortunately?) hard to strip off if you need to redo a coat. I've been experimenting with them lately and I've found that they work differently from acrylics. In fact, you are absolutely required to start with light colours and work down to the darks. This also means you have to prime your model in a light base colour before you start, and once you do start working with the paint, you'll need several coats to get an even opaque colour. It is possible I might be using too much thinner! I try to keep it 50%/50%, or sometimes 55% paint and 45% thinner if the coats look too watery. In addition to the two types of paint, paints can be further divided into gloss, metallic and flat. Gloss paint has a higher resin content in the paint that results in a shiny reflective surface that you can almost see your face in. Glossy paint almost doesn't need a clear coat to seal it in, but one would certainly be recommended. Glossy surfaces are also the best surface for applying decals on. Metallic paint is very similar to gloss but have metallic flakes in it that render the metalic finish. Metals differ a little and I often find they rub off very easily - which is probably why some paints recommend that you burnish the finish with a cloth when you are done to get rid of the excess. I feel they almost definitely need a clear coat to seal the paint in. Good old chrome silver, gold or copper are great base coats if you are planing to use a semi clear colour coat. Flat paints are just flat basic colours that aren't reflective once the paint has dried. Flats are probably the easiest to work with as you can tell when they are dry by the dull finish. If you recoat the paint, it will go down glossy so you can tell which parts you have or have not gone over. But that's not the end of it, if later decide that you wanted it to be glossy, all you need to do is coat it with a clear gloss coat spray. Not only will that protect the coat, it'll make it glossy. In addition to the types of paint you are working with, I've learned that the make of paint is just as important. Paint from different manufacturers will behave differently - particularly with their drying times. I've tried Humbrol and Tamiya enamel paints. Both are well fairly well established and widely used brands worldwide (at least that's the impression I get after reading some recent modeler magazines). There are most certainly other brands out there, but these are the two most accessible to me. Humbrol has a decent range of pre-mixed colours. I mean, I needed metallic pink for a particular robot model, and they had it. Fantastic! However, Humbrol paint take a very long time to dry and cure. It almost requires that I wait overnight before I can start working again. Even then, the heat off my fingers tend to leave marks in the finish - though I suspect I may have put on too heavy a coat. For someone as impatient as me, this does not gel very well. I won't knock it off as a bad brand. Far from it! Modelers have used it successfully for years. And I suppose if I was working on something that doesn't need a lot of attention, such as the shell of a vehicle, then perhaps it's not a bad choice. I do however find the paint to be really sticky if they get on the fingers. The stickiness however is quite handy. See, I normally mount the subjects I wanted painted on a piece of cardboard or a stick with some sticky tack or a roll of tape. This makes handling them while painting rather a simple process. Over-spray will definitely get on these. While I'm waiting for the paint to dry, I can touch the over-spray to check whether the paint is dry or otherwise. It'll feel sticky until it is dry. I started with Humbrol, but found that they were harder to work with than acrylic. Then I discovered Tamiya enamels and found them very easy to use and suited my needs better with their faster drying times. I can start with the next coat or start putting on different colours in almost half an hour to an hour after painting. While you can get all sorts of mixes with Humbrol, Tamiya on the other hand have a very limited selection of pre-mixed enamel paint (not counting their spray paints). Due to my impatience, my preference is currently leaning heavily towards Tamiya enamels. Part of the reason for my impatience is that I'm working with an airbrush. I can empty the paint into a jar and store it while waiting for my work to dry. But then I'd have to completely clean the spray gun so that any paint inside it won't clog the mechanism. This is a tedious process - and having been a bit lax at one time, I ended up clogging it. But that's just me. No matter what type of paint I use or the manufacturer, a paint job will always look stunning if it's done right. A good dose of patience helps too. I certainly need to learn that! The post I made with the Char's Custom Zaku II ver 2.0 painted Santa colours was one of my better recent efforts with enamels.