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Does anyone have any experience using liquitex economy or professional lines of acrylic paints on minis?

Obviously I could use them for terrain and such, but seeing as I have a lot of these paints I was wondering if they work wel on minis. Any tips or recommendations would be greatly appreciated.

I current use the black and white basic to lighten and darken gw paints on a pallet but otherwise directly on models it comes out very opaque and takes allot of layers while eating details.

I haven't tried the entire color range, but for minis you'll need to extend them out using flow aide.

that being said, I paint all of my minis now with craft acylics and flow aide. I'm very happy with how they come out.

Good to know. Flow aid has been on my list of things to get, any brand you can recommend ? I know liquitex and P3 makes it. Also any experience cutting it with gesso? I should probably get some empty paint pots to mix up colors.

 TheLionOfTheForest wrote:
Good to know. Flow aid has been on my list of things to get, any brand you can recommend ? I know liquitex and P3 makes it. Also any experience cutting it with gesso? I should probably get some empty paint pots to mix up colors.

I've been using the Liquitex Flow aide. the price is very reasonable considering how much you have to dilute it.

this is my most recent addition using Michaels brand craft paint and flow aide. (the silver was Army painter silver primer though). i'm no major artist, but it at least shows you it coverage type with a 50/50 mix flow aide to paint.

I would assume GW's paint line if you didn't tell me otherwise. Looks like I will be making a trip out to the hobby store later today.

 TheLionOfTheForest wrote:
I would assume GW's paint line if you didn't tell me otherwise. Looks like I will be making a trip out to the hobby store later today.

GW, Vallejo and Army painter all use a flow aide like chemical in their paints already so that you only need to add water to thin them out. aside from product branding, that (and smaller more contiguous pigment grain sizing) is really what you're paying for.

it IS good paint, i'm just trying to save money and I think i've found a good way to do that.

I will say that the mettallics from Vallejo and GW are far superior to crafting metallics. I recomend using the money to buy those. (I prefer Vallejo, better color range)

this is my craft paint I put into smaller dropper bottles I bought online.

If you can find it (not sure if they make it anymore more) craft acrylic by Sargent Art Inc.. I used to buy them when I worked at an art store back in 2001. The paint colors and pigmentation was spot on for GW's 2nd edition era paint line at about half the price.

definitely open to ideas, but the paint you see in my posts, cost me $0.29 per 4 oz bottle. yes, 29 CENTS. all in all, with those droppers, i'm at 74 colors for $64 bucks.

Wow that's cheap, you should put together sets and sell them on eBay. Would be awesome if you could get all the paints you need for a particular chapter for $15.

 TheLionOfTheForest wrote:
Wow that's cheap, you should put together sets and sell them on eBay. Would be awesome if you could get all the paints you need for a particular chapter for $15.

I have thought about it actually. thing is though, its not the highest quality paint ya know? I would feel guilty is someone though it was actual GW or equivelant paint.

I would consider building the same kit for people with an included fee if people wanted. but by request only.

The paints are normally only $0.59 anyway. its not like they're all that expensive.

Look at proper art stores for their highest quality pigment paints. Things like Golden Heavy body, M. Graham, Winsor Newton etc. Anything classed as "heavy body" as they have the hightest pigment to binder ratio.

Then if you get a good high quality matt medium and some flow aid and retarder you can mix almost the exact stuff from Vallejo / GW etc.

The trick is getting the proportion right. You have to mix the flow aid with purified water (10% - 1 drop FA to 9 drops Water) or so depending on brand.

The mix in up to 50% matt medium (usually a LOT less though, just technically can go up to 50%).

So to make up a standard 15ml bottle for exampe, you put in 1ml-2ml diluted flow aid, 3ml-5ml of matt medium and the rest (approx 10ml) of paint.

Considering most artist quality paints come in 60ml or more tubes, that's 6 bottles of paint per tube. Buy a tube of "mixing white" to thin it out even further. Or go a step further and get some black as well.

Thin it out even further by making highlight colours. 2 bottles of standard colour, 2 bottles mixed with 1/4 white, 2 bottles with 1/2 white. then 1 bottle with 2/3rd white for the brightest highlight and 1 bottle with black mixed in for the shade.

Now you have 5+ colours in 15ml bottles from a few tubes of paint and some mediums. If you buy the mediums in bulk (500ml bottles go for around $15) you can see just how much paint you can make for peanuts.

[EDIT] Remember to also pickup some 6mm Glass beads (plain glass, no colour etc) as agitators. Due to these paints being hand made and from multiple materials, a good shake with an agitator is recommended before each use).

I've had great success mixing my own paints up!!! Especially with colors that are notoriously bad in their application such as white. I would recommend others try this'd this also!

Hm. May have to experiment with thinning down a bit of the tube or two of Liquitex heavy body acrylic my fiance has lying around. I tried a few of the soft body ones that I found on clearance and, for miniatures, at least, they weren't even worth the cost at 75% off.

I definitely use the Liquitex artists acrylics. As of now, I've got white, black, and cobalt blue (holy crap is it blue).

As for craft acrylics, I'm a huge fan of DecoArt's "Americana" range. Coverage is not the best, but you can't beat the price

I've been mixing them to match GW colors (getting pretty good at color matching).

I can speak only of Liquitex Acrylic Inks (Transparent), which are marvellous.
Burnt Sienna is my personal favorite.

I am sitting on a cache of value series and professional series. I bought some twist top paint dropper bottles from Michaels (jury's out whether the bottles are quality enough to seal well) a gallon of distilled water and liquitex flow aid. I also have to play around with some mixing medium. If/when these paints run out I am going to try CHEAP craft series paints. The liquitex black looked faded, not true black so I am on a search for a good black replacement as it seems to be one of those colors I always burn through.

For those consdiering the craft paints, I highly recommend the "Delta Ceramcoat" brand. They cost about a 1.20 a piece for 2 oz, which is a bit more than most craft store brands, but drastically cheaper than miniature-branded paints. I've tried all the craft store brands and Delta seems to have the best coverage and pigmentation. That said, I do use other craft paints when they have a color I like.

I also second the idea of putting them into dropper bottles. I recently put all my craft paints into droppers that I picked up on Ebay, made a case for them and blogged the process.

http://chicagoskirmish.blogspot.com/2012/09/do-it-yourself-paint-cases-and-dropper.html

Nice job! Those are the dropper bottles I wanted but couldn't find. I have flip top dropper bottles instead of twist cap.