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Hello again,

Can anyone recommend me some good thinning products for GW paints specifically? I know there's other bands out there much better thinned, but for the meantime I'm stuck with Citadel.

I feel like water doesn't really cut it and I find most of my paint difficult to thin with it.

I appreciate the help, ladies and gents.

Liquitex mediums.

Airbrush medium, matt medium, ultramatt medium, gloss medium, glaze medium, blending medium, slo-dri medium, flow aid, they also do texture mediums.

http://www.liquitex.com/FluidMediums/

Its a USA brand, I'd expect to find them in any serious art supply store, over here in the UK I like this place to order from;
http://www.artsupplies.co.uk/cat-liquitex-mediums.htm

HairySticks wrote:
Liquitex mediums.

Airbrush medium, matt medium, ultramatt medium, gloss medium, glaze medium, blending medium, slo-dri medium, flow aid, they also do texture mediums.

http://www.liquitex.com/FluidMediums/

Its a USA brand, I'd expect to find them in any serious art supply store, over here in the UK I like this place to order from;
http://www.artsupplies.co.uk/cat-liquitex-mediums.htm

^ this.

Of course, you can use water, but depending on how much you need to thin in, it does not as smoothly "thin" paint compared to an actual medium.

I use liquitex and "golden" brand mediums, and am very happy with them.

For normal colours I use mix of 50% liquitex matt medium, 10% liquitex flo-aid, 40% distilled water.

For metallics I use a mix of matt medium, gloss varnish, and flo-aid (80/10/10).

Can't beat Liquitex for ubiquity, although I've preferred each of the few Golden products I've had a chance to try. I generally get by just fine with nothing but water, but either brand is a reasonably safe bet if you want to start playing with various mediums.

 oadie wrote:
Can't beat Liquitex for ubiquity, although I've preferred each of the few Golden products I've had a chance to try. I generally get by just fine with nothing but water, but either brand is a reasonably safe bet if you want to start playing with various mediums.

I can second Oadie's observation - I too prefer the "golden" brand products.
You can usually get them at art supply stores if your local craft store does not have them.

Again, nothing wrong with liquitex - the golden just seems to work a tiny bit better (yeah, I know...thats subjective....).

best of luck!

The only one of those mediums that will actually "thin" the paint on its own is the Airbrush Medium, since that is a thinner consistency than the paint. The other mediums merely make the paint more transparent unless you also add water.

I recommend against using rubbing alcohol to thin paint. Because it evaporates so quickly the paint can very quickly form a skin when left exposed to the air. By quickly I'm talking 60 seconds or so in my experience.

Personally I just use water with my GW paints if brushing by hand. I use Vallejo Model Air paints pretty much exclusively in my airbrush.

Ive recently taken to using a little bit of isopropyl alcohol, maybe 5-10% in my flow aid mix. (for brush work only - adding any alcohol to airbrush acrylics is kinda dumb as it will only make the already bad tip dry problems worse.

The reason I tried it is purely because I have 99%IPA, but do not have a bottle of distilled water. I was finding that when I mixed up a 200ml bottle of flow aid with tap water (or even boiled and cooled water) that a week maybe two later, I'd have things floating in the water... some sort of bacteria maybe, lime scale, algae... whatever it was, I dint like it. Realise that using distilled water totally eliminates this problem, but I find that so does having 5-10% of the mix being alcohol. I've not tried using pure alcohol to thin the paints yet; I do use it to strip models and it will dissolve even fully cured paints back into fluid.