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I've always used water as my paint thinner of choice, but recently I've gotten irritated at how tough it can be to work with some times (curse you hydrogen bonding!!) and have been thinking about investing in a little paint thinner.

However, a buddy of mine, who is an absurdly good painter, told me that just adding a bit of dish soap to your water is an easier and cheaper way to thin. So I figured I'd come here for a few general pointers and maybe some recommended brands. A couple specific questions I have are:

1) the first time I tried the dish soap, my paint acted much waterier (that can't be a word ) than usual, running into the gaps in a model when I was trying to basecoat and giving me an uneven tone. What's the recommended paint to water ratio for base coating and your usual wash/blend tones?

2) will it damage my brush if I just mix a whole bottle of lightly soapy water and use that as my brush wash? I assume it wouldn't but these brushes are so absurdly fragile I already change them out every few months or so.

the first time I tried the dish soap, my paint acted much waterier (that can't be a word ) than usual, running into the gaps in a model when I was trying to basecoat and giving me an uneven tone

So that's how you make homemade washes!

When it comes to thinning paints:

1) the trick to me seems to be taking the thinned paint on the brush, and then letting it soak into a paper towel before painting. Thus I paint with only a minimal dosage of watery paint on the brush, and the paint stays in place instead of flowing everywhere. Here is a great tutorial on glazing that explains the thing with the exceed of water far better than I just did .

2) Thinned paints generally are poor at covering the model, so when I'm doing basecoats or undercoats I'm often tempted to thin the paint only minimally (I'm using quite watery Army Painter paints, though). Still, the details of the miniature aren't lost -- at least for my eye. I'm a beginner, though, and I don't get much feedback with my painting, so follow my footsteps only at your own risk .

I thin all my paints. I got a dropper bottle that I keep handy whenever I paint. I use distilled water that you can get from most grocery stores. This way it doesn't have mineral particles that may show up on thin layers of paint. A jug of Distilled water will go a long way. I put a few drops of this in all my paint pots every few months just to keep them from drying out at all.

When I'm painting, I add a brush worth of the color I need to my painting palette then add a brush worth of Lahmian Medium or Distilled water. Which one I use just depends on the job I'm doing. Sometimes I do a little of both. For instance, if you are making a wash or shade, just using water to thin it down will make it dry splochy, but if you add a little medium in as well it will make the wash flow and dry perfectly.

One thing to remember is less is more. You can always add more water or medium, but you can't subtract it once you've added it (but you can add a little more paint). You just have to play around with it till you find a formula that works for you. And it's always better to do a few extra layers of thin paint than one or two thick layers that end up obscuring detail.

I also recommend that you watch a few of the videos from GWTV on youtube. Here is a good one where Duncan ends up thinning most every paint he applies to the model. Just follow his examples while doing a few test minis and you'll get the hang of it quick.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xy7AoKAywHk

Not like this.

Honestly, I just load my palette up with the paint then get my bristles on the brush wet, then apply from the water pot directly to the paint on the pallete. Swirl it around until it feels like it's going to give me the coverage I want, then apply to the model.

If you want to bake rather than just cook, just go get a water dropper so you can 1) keep your water 100% clear and clean and 2) control the exact amount of water you get on the pallete.

If you want to make your paint intentionally transluscent without changing the properties of the paint, you'll want a paint medium. I don't know too much about it other than what they show you in the "How to paint Nagash" video GW put out. Those are quality videos to learn how to do the basics to make a really great looking paint job, btw.

Soap liquid is more for making washes. The idea is that it breaks the surface tension so the paint can run into gaps more easily. I personally think washes work better and look more subtle without it. You would only need a spec of soap for it to work. I wouldn't use it for ordinary painting though as it might cause the pigment to separate from the medium, and I think your natural-hair brushes will last longer if you keep them away from soap.

If you want to thin paints properly without making them watery, you should use acrylic medium (or retarder). You should be able to get a big bottle of it in any art shop for around $10. You can also get glaze medium if you want to make paint more transparent. There are actually quite a lot of acrylic mediums for different effects. Gloss medium can be very useful for miniatures as it's self-leveling (you can matt over it later with varnish if you don't like the sheen).

To get the right consistency, what I like to do is put a blob of paint on a plate (or palette), then I put a drop of water and/or medium on the same plate, close to (but not touching) the paint. Then I dip the brush into the drop of water and drag a thin line into the blob of paint to connect them. So the surface tension becomes one (don't mix). Then I dip my brush into the area where the two meet, and paint a small line on the plate to test it. If it's too watery then I'll take a bit more from the paint side, if it is to thick I drag a little more water into the edge. You can keep dragging more water in as you go to maintain the right consistency. Don't mix it all at once or swish your brush around in it, as that will just homogenize it which takes away all your control.

I usually judge the consistency by testing it on the palette. If it's too watery you'll be able to see through it and it won't adhere to the surface at all. If it's too thick then it will be opaque and gloopy. The perfect consistency is the point just before it becomes too thin, where it is slight transparent but still thick enough to paint with. (I realize this is a somewhat circular definition, but you'll know it when you see it).

You should also wash your brush regularly, even when you aren't changing colours. Give it a swish around in some clean water every now and then to stop paint drying on the bristles. It'll last longer and you'll have less lumps

To adjust the consistency of your paint simply add Dihydrogen monoxide in varying quanitities depending on the brand of paint you purchased. Ideally, you want your mixture to be thin enough to not obscure detail but thick enough so that it doesn't run. Diluting your paint with too much Dihydrogen Monoxide can reduce the concentration of your pigments to the point where they don't apply evenly making the coat translucent or transparent.

In other words, add water to it. Find a consistency you are happy with. I like a 3:1 mixture or a 2:1 but it depends on the paint brand.

For regular brush painting 90% of the time I just use water, but I have also been known to add drying retarder to... well... slow the drying.

Soap is to break the surface tension, it's important if you are doing really thin (low viscosity) coats. For base coating and basic block painting it's not necessary.

The hardest thing by far is learning how thin to make the paint... I really struggle to describe how thin to make paint because it's 95% how it *feels* and it's very hard to describe. There's actually a few things going on at once, the two biggest things are how thick the paint is and how much you have on your brush. If you are putting too much paint on your brush you're never going to figure out how thin to make the paint. So start by making sure you aren't overloading your brush. The next thing is brush control, if you're just smooshing the brush in to the model, again it will be very hard to figure out the right consistency.

But I highly recommend getting someone who knows what they're doing to SHOW you how to do it, get them to load a brush up for you and thin some paint down which you then use. If you can't find someone it's a hard slog, it took me years to really understand that my painting wasn't improving because I didn't understand flow, viscosity and how much to load the brush.

If you can't find someone to teach you, perhaps try some of the Games Workshop painting tutorials, watch them in HD and try and get an idea of how the paint flows off the brush.

Here's a good example:



Though he is using "layer" paints to start with, so if you're using something else you'll typically need to thin more. But just watch it in HD, notice how much paint he has on the brush and how the paint flows off the brush on to the model. If your paint is too thick, it will be ridgy and textured as you apply it to the model which gives a grainy finish, you notice by the time he's done with that ogre the finish is nice and smooth, that's what you're aiming for.

This may sound weird but spit works lol

I use a 1:1 mix of water and matte medium. I've found that my models look best when I water the basecoat paints down enough that it requires 2 - 3 coats to cover up the primer color. Same with layers, 2 - 3 - 4 coats to cover up.

Sure it's more work to apply those extra layers of paint, but I get a much smoother finish, especially with colors like white or yellow.

I also use a drop of Flow Improver per oz of dilution liquid. It's the same effect as liquid soap, just no color or additives. It was on clearance so I went ahead and got it.

P.S. Matte medium is the non-GW, non-overpriced version of Lahmian medium. It's just acrylic medium suspended in liquid. It helps water the paint down without making it so runny it doesn't stick.

 Loken31809 wrote:
This may sound weird but spit works lol

And for a lot of things too.

But if we stick to just paintbrushes, spit is also a good conditioner for your paintbrush's hair.

In my opinion, learning to thin paints properly is the hardest and most rewarding intermediate-level skill in painting. Doing it properly is harder than any other intermediate level skill (like wet blending or feathering), and doing it properly and consistently will yield far superior results.

First, there are no hard and fast rules. It takes experience to know what consistency paint you want, for what task. "Consistency of milk" is not really useful except in the most simplest sense, different paints (brand and pigment) need to be thinned differently, depending on the use case, if you want to achieve the most optimal result.

Water is just fine to achieve most results with most paints. However, it does cause an issue in that paint thinned with too much water (or paint that is too wet) dries unevenly, with visible rings. In an exaggerated way, you can see this clearly if you try to make a wash using water, rather than a medium. The result looks terrible.

However, a little water works just fine, and I thin 60% of my work with just water by wetting the tip of my brush, putting it onto a wet palette beside my paint a diluting it.

When it works poorly is with colors that are hard to paint anyhow, like white, bone, yellow; to a lesser extent, red, orange, and very light colors. This is what I do when I need to thin those colors:

Liquitex Flo-Aid is an excellent product to add body. It's diluted 20:1 with water, so even the smallest bottle will last you a really long time. Once you make your Flo-Aid water, use an eye dropper to put it into a palette with no paint. I usually use a 6 cup palette and put a couple of drops of flo-aid in 3 of them before I work to make my life easier.

There are other good mediums as well: Liquitex makes Matte and Ultramatte mediums, a blending medium, and a drying retarder. Vallejo has both drying retarders and thinners, and Citadel Lahmian medium works great. I prefer the Liquitex products because they are much, much larger bottles.

I almost always put my paint onto a wet palette. I then wet the tip of my brush with flo-aid, put it adjacent to my paint, and mix a little until I have the consistency I want. This is good for a few minutes; after that, as the paint dries, even a little, I need to do it again.

It is critically important not to have too much paint on the paintbrush. This often happens when you mix with a brush, and then paint straight from that brush. You're much better off to use a separate brush to mix, or to clean your brush after mixing, BEFORE painting. If it's too watery, Remember, you really just want paint on no more than a couple of millimeters of the tip of your brush with any type of detail work, and no more than the top 1/3 of the brush on any work.

Let me repeat: If your paint brush has too much paint, no matter how you thinned it, your results will be suboptimal.

Also critical is that you use the correct size brush. If you use too small a brush, you'll end up with brush strokes or paint ridges, because you're making many paint strokes. If you use too large a brush, you'll get paint where you don't intend, and covering up those spots will cause you problems. Generally, larger brushes will give you better results than smaller ones, as long as you can accurately place the paint. Also, FLAT brushes are easier to use than round ones, if you need to evenly cover a surface (try painting a wall with a round brush!).

Now, patience is really part of the whole thinning thing. There are some colors, like white or bone that are "hard to paint". Really, what that means is that these chalky pigments take more layers to cover, and tend to catch light reflections with even slight imperfections, so it's less forgiving. To paint large areas a color like bone, without brush strokes, you want to apply many thin coats. So, take a flat brush, and be prepared to do 5-10 coats where each of the first layers look crappy and translucent. Don't rush it. As long as the layers are thin and have no texture added once dried, your end result will look great.

On the other hand, most of the dark colors (like dark blue) cover really well and dry really flat, so they require only minimal thinning.

As a curveball: Paints dry up with age, so an older paint needs more thinning than newer ones. On the bottle of Citadel paints there's a date. If the bottle is 2013, it is likely to be much more liquidy than a bottle that says 2008.

Now, there are cases when you don't want to thin very much, or at all.

For instance, if I'm painting on silver studs, I first do a wash (to darken the area around the stud). Once that's dry, I paint a black dot and a silver dot on top of that. I do the silver dot unthinned, because I don't want to dot more than once (the black dot doesn't have to be 100% black, so it doesn't matter if it's slightly translucent). Another example is when I'm lightly covering a raised edge, similar to a drybrush technique, and I want a dusty finish to where I run out of paint. An example is the final highlight to a skull; I want the paint to stipple slightly as I run out of it on my brush, and you can't do this if it's wet.

On the other hand, there are times, such as purity scrolls, where I want my layer that covers my washed scroll to be MORE translucent, so this means that I will do 1-2 layers of extra-thinned offwhite (like Rakkarth flesh or Ushbanti Bone).

Hope this helps. The whole thinning thing really just takes practice and experimentation.

Thanks Talys, I've been having a horrible time trying to grasp paint thinning for the paintbrush and I think your advice is going to help.

I have one question though:

Some paints, like chaos black or midnight blue (old citadel) have "perfect" consistency to me and are a joy to paint, they're very thin and have excellent coverage.

Is there no brand of paint where every color is that good ?

From a mechanical standpoint, I see nothing that could prevent having the exact same pigment size and distribution in all paints, and I just don't get why some paints take so much work to be usable.

morgoth wrote:
Thanks Talys, I've been having a horrible time trying to grasp paint thinning for the paintbrush and I think your advice is going to help.

I have one question though:

Some paints, like chaos black or midnight blue (old citadel) have "perfect" consistency to me and are a joy to paint, they're very thin and have excellent coverage.

Is there no brand of paint where every color is that good ?

From a mechanical standpoint, I see nothing that could prevent having the exact same pigment size and distribution in all paints, and I just don't get why some paints take so much work to be usable.

The short answer in acrylic paints is no. I own a silly number of paints; nearly complete sets of all the major brands, and I've experimented by painting, for instance, every red in 1, 2, and 3 layers on a sprue with black primer to check color and coverage. Some colors, like bone (GW Screaming Skull, P3 Menoth highlight, VMC Bone) are all pretty miserable when compared to an Ultramarine blue from any company.

In do not know why some pigments are inferior to others, but it's not just you. I recall old WD masterclass articles bemoaned how red was a "weak pigment" and mentioned workarounds (that are mercifully unnecessary with new GW).

My favorite brand of paint is still GW, but this is solely a function of them having the most colors relevant to what I want to paint, and organized on a good system that makes possible many synergistic scifi schemes without mixing my own colors.