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I’m quite new to painting and so far have only done GW stuff using GW paints. For a beginner I find their base paint, shade paint, two layer paints quite helpful and the app is great for showing you which paints to combine to get the desired effect. But now I want to branch out and am wondering how to go about finding colour combinations for colours NOT covered by the app. For instance I want to get into super hero minis. I want to paint DC’s Blue Beetle from Knight Games but don’t have a clue which colors (GW or other brand) to use to get that light blue. Does anybody have any tips - for this specific model or for online resources to help more generally with colour combos?

Learn to mix colours for sure.

For this I would suggest a colour like temple guard blue, and you want to take it up to cold white without any Grey's in the middle.

For shadows you could use something like Kantor blue.

First, I highly recommend watching some videos on YouTube about color theory. Marco frisoni is great at explaining the concepts behind it and I always suggest him as my go to.

For light blues you have many many options. You need to decide how you want to get to your desired destination is all.

If all you want is a light blue paint, I suggest mixing your own. Kimera Kolors are my go to. I'd probably mix a Pthalo blue red shade with some white and maybe a tiny bit of magenta.

If you want something easier, a fenrisian Grey would function.

If you wanna get creative, a black and white value sketch with a blue contrast or oil wash over it.

So many ways to get to the same result

Easiest, but expensive and least flexible, is to take your desired colour into a hobby shop and buy the appropriate paints needed. Pretty much any colour under the sun is available for sale.

However, most colours are easily mixable from a handful of basic primaries and black/white. Light blue is blue + white, for example. Learning basic colour theory (A+B=C, or 'how do I make this colour brighter/lighter/darker' and eventually 'how can I mix any colour I see') is well worth the effort as it opens up a whole world of options.

Most hobbyists tend to fall middle of the road eventually, doing some mixing to adjust their paint colours but still owning plenty of convenience mixes.

Practice practice practice. Watch the videos as recommended because it’s not as simple as you think.

But with all things you are just going to have to practice and learn the skill. I’m still learning and have accepted that I will start out down a path to achieve a certain result but will get something different than I imagined but I will have learned something along the way.

Thanks for all the tips. Really useful as always. Mixing colours isn’t going to be a problem but what I I’m still struggling with is how to combine colours to get the desired effect. If I get the right light blue for the costume how will I know what shade to use for the shadows, highlights to make it look right? Also is it just me or is GWs painting system less good for light colours? All their really light paints are layer paints intended to highlight darker base paints. But what to do if the midrange of the colour you want is more in the range of those layer paints. How do you turn the lightness up from that?

 queen_annes_revenge wrote:
Learn to mix colours for sure.

For this I would suggest a colour like temple guard blue, and you want to take it up to cold white without any Grey's in the middle.

For shadows you could use something like Kantor blue.

I agree with the mixing thing.

Premixed colours are great for painting armies, because you can just pick up the same pot of paint and know you're going to get the same colour out of it on soldier dude 1 as soldier dude 100.

But for one offs like this, mixing is the way to go.


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Jandgalf wrote:
Thanks for all the tips. Really useful as always. Mixing colours isn’t going to be a problem but what I I’m still struggling with is how to combine colours to get the desired effect. If I get the right light blue for the costume how will I know what shade to use for the shadows, highlights to make it look right? Also is it just me or is GWs painting system less good for light colours? All their really light paints are layer paints intended to highlight darker base paints. But what to do if the midrange of the colour you want is more in the range of those layer paints. How do you turn the lightness up from that?

It can help to load the image into an image editor and use the sample colour tool to figure out what colours are used where, then you start from a colour you have and mix in until you get close to what you're aiming for.

There's videos on youtube that explain how to mix, though the ones I've watched tend to focus on natural colours (flesh tones, browns, etc) rather than high contrast colours.

So for example, I loaded the image you posted into GIMP and used the colour picker to roughly figure out the shade, midtone and highlight colours on that model...



So he's mostly made of blues and blue-greys. You can make the blue greys with a vibrant blue + neutral grey/black/white.

More challenging is when you need to match colours that aren't just blue of varying value and saturation, and then it can be useful to watch some youtube videos on how to mix colours.

Thanks. That’s a great tip with the computer. I’ll give that a go