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The brush-cleaning stuff looks good. I'd pick it up if it was a realistic purchase, but the postage sadly prevents that.
As for the paint system, not for me, I'm afraid. I mix sub-colours all the time, but I'm not intertested in needing to use pipettes and so forth when I need a very small amount of a specific colour, and I like being able to eyeball what I'll get by mixing Warpaints Tanned Flesh with VMA Rose Brown, and then varying it by adding a drop (or less) of Panzer Aces Light Rust, and doing so to paint the flesh on 6 models.
If someone was using very few colours to do an army with a limited palette, then sure, but I like to be able to eyeball a lot of different shades and tones and then vary or play with them on the fly.
Azazelx wrote: The brush-cleaning stuff looks good. I'd pick it up if it was a realistic purchase, but the postage sadly prevents that.
As for the paint system, not for me, I'm afraid. I mix sub-colours all the time, but I'm not intertested in needing to use pipettes and so forth when I need a very small amount of a specific colour, and I like being able to eyeball what I'll get by mixing Warpaints Tanned Flesh with VMA Rose Brown, and then varying it by adding a drop (or less) of Panzer Aces Light Rust, and doing so to paint the flesh on 6 models.
If someone was using very few colours to do an army with a limited palette, then sure, but I like to be able to eyeball a lot of different shades and tones and then vary or play with them on the fly.
Ahhh, the syringes are only really needed if you're mixing from the RAL database to create full bottle of colour or creating a full bottle of colour from one of the mixing formulas, other than that you can just use drops from the dropper bottles much as you would using normal paints in place of the millilitres, the system is there to cater for everyone. It just generates much less waste and if you only need a very small amount, you can easily eyeball it if you count a single drop as "1" and then roughly guage what you need to remove so 0.4ml would be just under half a drop, 0.7ml would be just over.
The idea behind it was repeatability as that's one of the things that puts people off colour mixing completely, but you're doing exactly what the system was designed for by mixing paints anyway, just we offer it as a single pigment line rather than mixing pre mixed colours which can have a big level of unpredicatbility since you won't know what pigments are in the colour (Unless of course they list them...which most companies don't), but if you prefer mixing premixed colours, you can create your own specific flesh tones and bottle them up easily, then adjust them on the fly as needed.
It's pretty much how we're painting now, a select number colours that we use day to day and then adjust them with various levels of greys, yellow, reds and blues.
This message was edited 2 times. Last update was at 2021/02/24 10:13:25
New video up on our Youtube Channel, How to paint Onyx Skin
Also a free, updated guide on how to use our Alpha paints as well as how to mix colours using three different methods, The INSTAR system way, the traditional way and the bulk way
A friend just posted about the changes to your range on our club's painting page, and I am intrigued, to say the least.
I think the Alpha range might be risky for you, judging by the number of people here who seem reluctant to mix their own colours, but I am very, very interested in the idea. Before I next buy any new colours, I need to at least try this out. I am not as good as I should be when it comes to sustainability, but I am at least conscious of it and this seems like something that deserves a try. The level of flexibility certainly appeals as well.
(I wonder if some people who are reluctant to mix colours because they might not quite get a perfect match also over-estimate their own ability to paint well enought to exactly match previous models anyway!)
I am curious, how well would a paint mixed from your Alpha range mix with a regular acrylic from GW or Vallejo?
This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2021/04/07 17:36:23
Though guards may sleep and ships may lay at anchor, our foes know full well that big guns never tire.
Fifty wrote: A friend just posted about the changes to your range on our club's painting page, and I am intrigued, to say the least.
I think the Alpha range might be risky for you, judging by the number of people here who seem reluctant to mix their own colours, but I am very, very interested in the idea. Before I next buy any new colours, I need to at least try this out. I am not as good as I should be when it comes to sustainability, but I am at least conscious of it and this seems like something that deserves a try. The level of flexibility certainly appeals as well.
(I wonder if some people who are reluctant to mix colours because they might not quite get a perfect match also over-estimate their own ability to paint well enought to exactly match previous models anyway!)
I am curious, how well would a paint mixed from your Alpha range mix with a regular acrylic from GW or Vallejo?
Weirdly the take up for the new system of the Alpha range has been pretty positive so far, probably due to the fact that we've stated that you can make the majority of the premixed Alpha range just through droplets alone, but the idea came about from seeing loads of forum posts where it starts with "I'm trying to find this colour" or "I want a specific colour but no range has it". We're also working on a system of painting that helps massively, rather than a how to guide tellign you step by step which colours to use, we leave that door open to the painter to decide on their colours and instead provide them with a guide on how to choose the colours to get the best effect possible for what they want, we're currently in the final stages of it.
Rather than going down the Kimera or Scale75 Artist range where you tend to put a big blob on the palette and then take a bit from each and mix somewhere else which does put people off, we decided to keep it simple and straightforward. Since every drop out of our bottles is pretty much uniform, regardless of the colour, it was easy to make recipes that just said "Mix 2 drops of this, 1 drop of that and 4 drops of this and you'll get this colour". Put that alongside easy to follow colour wheels and an ever increasing database of colours means that it's easy to find the colour you want and due to the way we've done it, what you see on the screen, 99% of the time will be what you get, but because every monitor setup is different it's difficult to get it to 100%.
Then we have swatch recording cards where, if you make a colour you like or paint an army up in a specific scheme using specific colour mixes, you can paint a swatch on the card and write down the recipe to make it, then, because of the uniformity of the droplets, means that you'll make that same colour every single time. Which comes round to the point about armies, because of the way the system works, there's no fear in trying to match the same colour to keep it consistent, so long as you write down what the formula was, you can repeat it all the time consistently and repeatedly. In our "Using Alpha" guide under the "Free Stuff" tab, we show three ways you can mix colours.
With your point about reluctance to mixing, We're not sure if it's because people might recognise that the colour they've used is not exact (Which if you get it close is going to pretty hard to spot anyway unless you paint side by side on the same model) or because they feel it's beyond their skill level which we feel is wrong, as we've pointed out, if we can do it starting entirely from scratch on an industrial level, so can everyone on a hobby scale ,though if more people come forward to say why they are reluctant to colour mixing, we can then improve the system to make it more accessible. At the moment we feel we've done a lot to make it easy from providing empty bottles, syringes, storage containers, recipes, colour wheels, some of our sponsored painters are doing paint alongs etc
Given that the Alpha range can be turned into washes and glazes easily using Water+ means that you have an incredible toolkit at your disposal to make the colours you want to make.
I'm not sure on the last question though....I know some people have added the Pure White to Corax White to make a super luminescent white so they do mix in well with other ranges meaning you can adjust them accordingly.
,though if more people come forward to say why they are reluctant to colour mixing, we can then improve the system to make it more accessible. At the moment we feel we've done a lot to make it easy from providing empty bottles, syringes, storage containers, recipes, colour wheels, some of our sponsored painters are doing paint alongs etc