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I got myself an AK basic starter acrylic paint set, as it offers the 12 main colors of the chromatic scale (+ black & white). I found out a fun color swatch one can iterate by utilizing 4 of those main colours:

Deep Yellow
Imperial Blue
Frog Green
Scarlet Red

These colors, when used as they are, remind me a lot of the old 90's citadel paint shades I was using at the time for painting WFB & Epic models - the blue we used for Ultramarines, The goblin green base..

Were the citadel paint shades less complex (less desaturated) back then, than they are today? This sort of saturated colors feel very nostalgic, and oddly childish compared to modern colourschemes

Spent another night messing with this swatch. These colors really pop! I am thinking a cool scheme could be to use this sort of highly saturated tones for Space Marine armour (the old "Camouflage is for cowards" argument) and significantly more desurated colors for everything else.. Worth a shot, given my piss poor small detailing skills

Any ruminations from fellow painters appreciated! Do you equate oldhammer paint jobs with an overly saturated pallette?

Best thing to do is try it out on a test mini and see how it turns out. Duncan rhodes made a few oldstyle painting videos on his channel, head there if interested maybe you'll get an idea.

 Maréchal des Logis Walter wrote:
Best thing to do is try it out on a test mini and see how it turns out. Duncan rhodes made a few oldstyle painting videos on his channel, head there if interested maybe you'll get an idea.

Thanks, but I'm having too much fun by myself trying out things over here! I wonder if colour equivalence lists exist to proxy these same four colors in the Citadel range..

EDIT: According to AK, there is no direct equivalence for Frog Green. The other three do exist:
Scarlet Red = Vallejo #817
Deep Yellow = Vallejo #915 / Mr Color #4
Imperial Blue = Mr Color #465

But AFAIK, shouldn't Frog Green just be a 50/50 mix of Deep Yellow & Deep Green? If so, you could mix it manually from Vallejo #915 & #969

EDIT2: To clarify, you can proxy this pallette with Vallejo & Mr Color H-series acrylics as follows:
For red, use #817
For yellow, use #915
For "goblin green", use a 50/50 mix of Vallejo #915 & #969
For blue, the only match seems to be Mr. Color H-series #465.. Vallejo #925 is the closest, but its not exact

I get you, experimenting is fun too but I talk with the PoV of someone not at all good enough at painting to come up with stuff himself lol!

Maybe be you know this technique already but you can try your mixes on a sheet of paper and keep it for later references, noting hte amount of each paint in the mix next to a spot of it.

 tauist wrote:
These colors, when used as they are, remind me a lot of the old 90's citadel paint shades I was using at the time for painting WFB & Epic models - the blue we used for Ultramarines, The goblin green base..

Were the citadel paint shades less complex (less desaturated) back then, than they are today? This sort of saturated colors feel very nostalgic, and oddly childish compared to modern colourschemes

While I don't have any of the AK paints, I can maybe provide some thoughts on the old school 90's range. They were by and large less "complex" or rather, more pure colours versus the more modern style of pre-mixed, desaturated "realistic" blends ready to use. Many pigments do not have good opacity so adding black and/or white to them strengthens their coverage, making the resulting paint more convenient for beginners. This is one of the reasons it's very hard to find perfect equivalents in modern miniature brands outside of specialty ranges like Kimera. Paints with 1-3 pigments are the standard in the artist world, not the exception, and the old ranges were artist's acrylics made-to-order for Citadel. While it's possible to mix colours and get very close to the overall hue versus using the original pigment, this will often lack the undertones and not mix out to anything but a muddy grey-ness. The downside of course to having low-count pigment paints is that they are highly variable in handling. There simply aren't, for example, any opaque, brilliant yellow pigments that aren't also too toxic to put into a mass market consumer product. Opacity, thickness, flow and undertone are all dictated, at least in part, by the pigment(s) used to make the paint.

Thanks for this insight! I now understand why yellows in acrylics are always a challenge

FWIW, I find renewed joy to painting with these simpler pigment mixes. I find many current GW paints puzzling to mix with, as they always tint towards wherever..

Yellows are the most notable culprits for "can't cover worth drek" but oranges often have the same issue (no surprise, they're mostly mixes that rely heavily on yellows as there are no inexpensive, non-toxic opaque brilliant orange pigments either). Red isn't great at covering on its own, unless you lean on the cadmium or cinnabar pigments and both of those have toxicity issues. Or you get into the earth pigment reds, which are very brown and brick-y.

There's really only a handful of good pigments that get used for most of our paints - no miniature paint manufacturer is going to use crushed lapis lazuli when phthalocyanine blue is thousands of times cheaper and more potent.

GW's paint range is designed for GW's painting style, which is "buy these 20-40 pots of paint and layer them exactly in this order". Nothing wrong with that (other than GW's ridiculous overpricing of minuscule paint pots that dry out in months) but it doesn't lend itself to actually learning how to paint - mixing paint, knowing how to manipulate color, hue and saturation to get the results you want is one of the primary hurdles between the basic and intermediate painter tiers. GW's paint isn't very mixing friendly because it's a lot of blends of many pigments already, and anyone who's mashed a bunch of paint together as a kid knows you get some gross flavour of brown or grey when you do that.