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I am building a Space Wolves army. They are a dark grey rather than the light blue grey from the codex. I still want to paint their shoulder pads red and yellow though but I don't want it to be so bright and saturated that it sticks out like a sore thumb. What's the best way to dial the strength of the color down?

- Mix with grey or black?
- Thin it with water? (And if so will a painting slow like me run into problems with the paint flowing everywhere?)
- Mix it with 'Matte Medium' or anything else that is transparent but has the thickness of paint?


Thanks in advance!

Use dull colors. Dark reds and dark yellows, especially with a little dark brown mixed in, will not be an overwhelming color. Mixing a bright red or yellow with a dark grey may tone then down also, but you run the risk of pinking or oranging your red and yellow.

Thinning with water helps give more even coats, but won't dull down the color once you get a good coat built up. If you thin it and only paint one coat, then the base color willl show up, but it tends to be patchy and not look very good.

Matt Medium kills shineyness, and doesn't really dull a color.

One of the fun facts about yellow... if you add black to it, you get olive drab.

Too much water will probably be a major headache for you, as yellow is notoriously finicky, and highly transparent to begin with. To darken a yellow, use a warm brown instead. Offhand, I'd think vermin or possibly snakebite leather might do the trick, depending on if you want it a muted warm or a muted cool.

My advice would be to basecoat the yellow bits with a warm brown first, and then apply the yellow over it.

Adding an appropriately toned brown can definitely help to keep reds and yellows from being too vibrant, as can painting from a brown basecoat. Reaper has some great non-vibrant reds and yellows - Dune Shadow for instance - that are wonderful alternatives to the Citadel color selection.

Hey don't add brown! ...sorry brothers to contradict.

But here is the perfect opportunity to apply your color theory.

You can properly 'mute' any hue when you add it's 'complementary' color. ...get a basic color wheel or even just google one. The color exactly opposite of your base color is it's complementary color.

So with red and yellow... you'd add a bit of 'green' to the red shadows and bit of 'purple' to the yellow shadows to mute them. Imo if you leave the highlight areas un-muted it will be striking and very effective.


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Also remember that with yellow... being the most expensive pigment to make, you get extremely poor coverage out of your general paint pot. So when you mix for shadow colors you will have to add a lot more base color (yellow) than with most other colors.

Gunzhard wrote:Hey don't add brown! ...sorry brothers to contradict.

But here is the perfect opportunity to apply your color theory.

You can properly 'mute' any hue when you add it's 'complementary' color. ...get a basic color wheel or even just google one. The color exactly opposite of your base color is it's complementary color.

So with red and yellow... you'd add a bit of 'green' to the red shadows and bit of 'purple' to the yellow shadows to mute them. Imo if you leave the highlight areas un-muted it will be striking and very effective.

This works as well as mixing a grey of equal lightness.

For example, if you think of the darkest red and the brightest red you've seen, the brightest would be mixed with a 10% grey and the darkest would be mixed with 90% grey. What I mean by 10% and 90% are not paint mixing ratios, so I stole this from some other site to illustrate.



Basically, mixing blood red (a bright red) with fortress grey (a bright grey) should yield the results you want. Just test around with the ratio at which you mix them to get the desired effect.

Great responses so far guys, thank you. I am confused about this though:

Heffling wrote:Matt Medium kills shineyness, and doesn't really dull a color.

My thinking is that since MM dries clear, if you mix it with paint you can get a thin and/or somewhat trsansperant red or yellow color coat, so that whatever was underneath (in my case grey) would partially shine through. But since no one recommended this option seems like a moot point. Now I just have to decide between the grey or brown/purple mixing routes....

Your idea with matte medium is sound but imo not incredibly easy to pull off.

I often do zenith highlights with my airbrush, then add very thinned color (using matte medium or water) so that white underneath shows through in the right places. However the difficultly for me is that it is so easy to make it all look uneven... if you just get a little more paint in one area, or an extra stroke etc... it looks all wrong.

Matte medium is very good for doing gradual blending though.

I'd try each of the above techniques on test minis, that is what I do. See my blog on mybattalion.com. Find the one that suits your style best. Good luck, and post pictures.

i think the best way to mute colors or darken them down is to add Badab black to the mix. I mix mine like this for a few reasons -- 1st, it gives you more control when darkening a color because there isnt as much black pigment picked up on the brush as opposed to chaos black (which tends to drowned out the color your mixing with) -- 2nd, it also adds water to the mix and gives it a good consistency to paint with. Also if you are going to darken yellow down I would recommend adding a brown wash to the mix instead of black. Good luck!