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I recently got into 40k with a Tau army, and today I finally bought some paints to start painting my assembled models (I tested out a few colors with my friend's paints before I decided on what colors to get). However, when I started painting, one of the colors was really thin and watery. I tried out all of the other 3 colors I bought, and none of them were even remotely close to being as watery as the one.

I'm using Vallejo paints at my friend's recommendation, and using German Grey, Neutral Grey, Light Orange, and Azure. The Azure paint came out really thin and watery, and it doesn't stick to my models at all. Is there anything I can do to fix this? Or is the entire bottle a waste now?

Sometimes paint in the little squeeze bottles is tough to mix well, even with violent shaking. You can carefully remove the tip of the bottle and stir the paint with a toothpick or straightened paper clip. If that doesn't work you got a poorly made bottle of paint and you should return it for another.

Krak_kirby wrote:Sometimes paint in the little squeeze bottles is tough to mix well, even with violent shaking. You can carefully remove the tip of the bottle and stir the paint with a toothpick or straightened paper clip. If that doesn't work you got a poorly made bottle of paint and you should return it for another.

What he said... I use a lot of Vallejo paints and I've only just finally found one that didn't mix (bloody red), which is a shame cuz it's a great color - but others on the forums have had this issue occasionally. If you can't shake it mixed then likely it's a bad bottle.

It's not a 'transparent' or ink correct? ...those are supposedly to be thin. On a side note - this might be good practice for painting with thinned paints. It takes a lot of brush strokes but the smooth blending affect is unmatched by other techniques.

Nope, it was just regular, acrylic paint. I used some of the same color that my friend has (Which is how I picked it out for my scheme) and it went on smoothly.

I managed to mix it a bit better by shaking it up frequently (To start off, I shook it hard for a good 20 seconds, followed by about 10 every time I needed more) and it turned out nice. I need about one and a half coats to fully paint the models, but it's better than not being able to coat them at all with what I've got. I also found that shaking it up, applying it to a palette, then stirring it a bit with a toothpick really made a difference.

I noticed that Vallejo paints need to be shaken/stirred for such a long time...

Well, mine did...especially the metallic's.

Lego posted a short tutorial on the use of paint agitators to help with this exact problem.

I ordered some of the lava beads to try out in my paints (I use vallejo, gw, reaper, and P3) and it's been an incredible help. Give it a look, it might change your life.

I'm using BBs from a shotgun in mine. They are lead, but I don't think they've affected the paint at all. Great for helping it mix though.

Are the bottles new? I've noticed that Vallejo paints in the dropper bottles are especially difficult to mix when full, since the paint doesn't have room to move around, especially right up by the tip. The first few drops will be bubbly, half-colored water, after which you start getting actual paint, which still could use a bit of mixing on the palette. Using an agitator should speed up mixing a decent bit, from what I've heard.

Krak_kirby wrote:Sometimes paint in the little squeeze bottles is tough to mix well, even with violent shaking. You can carefully remove the tip of the bottle and stir the paint with a toothpick or straightened paper clip. If that doesn't work you got a poorly made bottle of paint and you should return it for another.

QFT! Shaking always works mate!

From one novice painter to another, might I recommend a couple of these?:

http://www.games-workshop.com/gws/catalog/productDetail.jsp?catId=cat1030005&prodId=prod1095433

These are universally nice and thick and cover almost anything. You can put a layer of one of these on and then the Vallejo colour will show up better on top, or mix them together to get a similar color, or, heck, use a few by themselves. I'm not sure, but samples of German Grey look pretty close to Adeptus Battlegrey, one of my favorite foundation colors.

Sometimes they are a bit thin even after shaking, so I tend to water them down a bit further and use several coats. Trying to get complete coverage in a single coat just results in horrible thick paint, better to do several layers.

The colours I use most are US Olive Drab and German Grey.