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I know this will vary by brand & color of paint & painting style for different people, but I'm keen to read what sort of mixing ratios you normally use with water & additives.

Do you vary those ratios much or pretty much keep them the same all the time?

I don't use a ratio exactly. Standard rule of thumb is to get a "milky" consistency. Just pour some milk on your palette and play around with it to get a good idea (seriously). You'll need to add a different amount of water depending on how dry (or old) the paints are and how much water you keep on your brush so there really isn't a precise ratio, and honestly precision doesn't matter much IMHO. I constantly add water directly to the pots to prevent them from drying out actually.

I do not add water to washes and glazes unless they are old.

I don't know, because I use a big puddle of raw paint, and then I add drops of stuff on an edge to get it to whatever consistency I need, and then paint with it until the consistency starts to change, and go back to re-mix the additives.

MB

 Minimachine wrote:
I know this will vary by brand & color of paint & painting style for different people, but I'm keen to read what sort of mixing ratios you normally use with water & additives.

Do you vary those ratios much or pretty much keep them the same all the time?

I think you answered your own question right in your first sentence. It's less about ratios and more about consistencies and then it depends on what I'm trying to accomplish. I tend to work as thin as the task will allow. So a base coat will be the thickest. So, thick enough so I don't have to coat it a dozen times to cover, but as thin as I can get it so that it doesn't clog fine detail.

These days I prefer to brush paint with Vallejo airbrush paints because those are about as close to perfect out of the bottle (for base-coating) as I'm likely to get. It's a real time saver.

- Jay

I add a mixture of drying retarder, filtered water, and W&N paint thinner. The drying retarder makes the mixture fairly thick instead of watery. For GW paints I use a 1:1 ratio of paint to mixture, for reaper I use less of the mixture because that paint is thinner. For metallics I use a little more because I want my metallics to be very smooth.

There is a page on the reaper forums listed which famous painter uses what mixture. That's what I followed for my proportions at first but it created a mixture that was thicker than paint because of the drying retarder I have.

80-90% of my paints are thinned with plain water, by "feel" (to a consistency, not a ratio). If a particular paint proves troublesome or I'm looking for very specific qualities for a given task, I'll break out the various mediums.

Sometimes, that just means adding a touch of Pledge FloorCare (PFC, for short), along with the usual water. Other times, I add a DIY glaze medium consisting of Liquitex matte medium, Flow-Aid, Slow-Dri, and a touch of water (which can be thinned down with additional water - better to keep things thick, for when you want it, then thin as needed). I also have a wash medium for custom ink mixes made of water, PFC, and matte medium.

Unfortunately, I have to mix those two so infrequently (I have spare droppers and just make whole batches at a time) that I always end up forgetting the ratios used by the time I need more. What I can say about ratios is that: 1) I tried Les Bursley's wash recipe and hated it and 2) if you have an ingredient list or even just a rundown of the desired properties, playing with custom mixes and ratios is good practice and helps you really understand how the paints and mediums work.

Not really what you asked for, OP, but it seemed worth saying.

 oadie wrote:
80-90% of my paints are thinned with plain water, by "feel" (to a consistency, not a ratio). If a particular paint proves troublesome or I'm looking for very specific qualities for a given task, I'll break out the various mediums.

Sometimes, that just means adding a touch of Pledge FloorCare (PFC, for short), along with the usual water. Other times, I add a DIY glaze medium consisting of Liquitex matte medium, Flow-Aid, Slow-Dri, and a touch of water (which can be thinned down with additional water - better to keep things thick, for when you want it, then thin as needed). I also have a wash medium for custom ink mixes made of water, PFC, and matte medium.

Unfortunately, I have to mix those two so infrequently (I have spare droppers and just make whole batches at a time) that I always end up forgetting the ratios used by the time I need more. What I can say about ratios is that: 1) I tried Les Bursley's wash recipe and hated it and 2) if you have an ingredient list or even just a rundown of the desired properties, playing with custom mixes and ratios is good practice and helps you really understand how the paints and mediums work.

Not really what you asked for, OP, but it seemed worth saying.

Oadie I really like it that you create different medium mixes for different tasks. Do you find there's a big difference in the way paint performs depending on which additives you use?

I've been using a mix of water & Vallejo flow improver which seems to be doing the job so far, I also have some Vallejo retarder, airbrush thinner and Citadel lahmian medium but use those infrequently. The airbrush medium was actually removing previous layers of paint when I used it as an additive which was pretty disconcerting, but since switching to flow improver that's no longer been an issue.
I'm curious how much difference there is between various brands' additives and would like to test the water in that area further down the track.

Oh, definitely. There's a big difference in both behavior and opacity between neat paint, the same paint with a touch of water, and that paint effectively turned into a wash with heavy dilution and a surfactant. How much difference depends largely on what you're adding and in what proportion.

Different brands have different quirks and there are obviously different types of mediums, entirely. If you try a broad sampling, though, you'll find that there's a lot of overlap. What one brand calls an 'extender' might be another brand's 'glaze medium,' 'drying retarder,' or 'blending medium.' You may also read the label on a bottle and find that the one medium is supposed everything. Sounds great, until you realize that sometimes, you only want to tweak a few properties.

The main aspects we generally want to manipulate are body (thickness), opacity, dry time, and flow. Some mediums are narrowly targeted at only one aspect, but most will also have a noticeable effect on others. Any time you add something to your paints, you're decreasing the opacity - all the mediums are clear, so the same amount of pigment is spread over a larger volume, decreasing the pigment density. The less of a medium you have to add, the better the resulting coverage, which is why you might sometimes prefer to add a touch of flow improver to a paint, instead of having to layer several coats of the same paint, having diluted the pigment too far by relying on a generic mix.

Whether you're looking to increase open/working time for wet-blending with a retarder or decrease surface tension for smooth layers using a flow improver and water, you also end up tweaking the opacity. On the other side of the coin, this interrelation means that you often have multiple potential approaches for a given result. Glazing can be achieved through very thin, 'flow-y' coats of heavily diluted paint (flow improver and water, plus a touch of matte medium to keep the pigment in solution), or it can be done using thicker coats of matte/glazing/floating medium, tinted with a small amount of paint. The latter might prove faster for a more 'painterly' style, while the former would allow for a smooth finish after repeated application. Different ways to skin a cat, with neither being inherently better than the other.

 oadie wrote:
Glazing can be achieved through very thin, 'flow-y' coats of heavily diluted paint (flow improver and water, plus a touch of matte medium to keep the pigment in solution), or it can be done using thicker coats of matte/glazing/floating medium, tinted with a small amount of paint. The latter might prove faster for a more 'painterly' style, while the former would allow for a smooth finish after repeated application. Different ways to skin a cat, with neither being inherently better than the other.

Great tips here.

My suggestion for a general "painter's toolkit" of mediums would be dropper bottles of plain distilled water, 1:1 matte medium to distilled water, 8:1 retarder to distilled water, and 10:1 flo release to distilled water. IIRC, I used Golden brand additives for these mixtures. It will probably vary for different brands. The label should tell you how much these can be thinned and what percent can be added to paint before it breaks.

These are really only useful to have if you plan on painting with multiple thin layers of paint (you probably should be painting like this anyway). If painting straight from the pot, which is generally a bad practice, try using a matte medium mix as it tends to be the most versatile. It slightly lengthens the working time of the paint, decreases pigment density depending on how much you add so you can make glazes with your normal paints, and normalizes the sheen. The target consistency of your paint should be somewhere between skim milk and very watery.

The best benefit is that a few dollars for bottle of medium that will probably last you a lifetime significantly increases the life span of your bottles of paint.

"The consistency of milk."

JOKING.

I hate this description, because I personally have no freaking idea what the consistency of milk is in the context of painting. To me, milk is as liquid as water, and I sure as heck don't want to paint like that.

There is no simple answer.

1. When basecoating, as thin as possible so as not to layer streaks, yet thick enough, not to have drying spots or uneven drying.

2. When layering, slightly thicker than that, as I don't want to drop 10 layers to achieve a color diference.

3. When highlighting, quite thick (but still thinned), as I don't want the paint to run, and building a little bit of paint volume is ok.

4. When detailing, thinner than highlighting, because I need the paint to stay wet on a small brush. But thinner than layering.

5. When drybrushing, very thick, for obvious reasons.

6. When wet blending, the thickness varies greatly with the paint. When feathering, on the edge of runny and not runny.

What I do is put water into a plastic palette, wet your brush, and mix that with your paint on a wet palette, which helps your paint keep its thinned consistency.

Oh yes, and though I have a jug of distilled water, it's probably 10 years old now, as I just use tap water. Because I use a lot of water, I fill a squeeze bottle -- looks like a half-liter drinking bottle with a bent straw and a sharp tip. I also use that to refill my wet palette, adding water to the edges.