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My sweet wife has bought me a Game Color Ink set for valentines. I've never used inks, mostly just plain acrylics, but I'm very interested to try these out and see how it works.

I've got 1:300 scale wwii aircraft, Goblins, wood elves or an IG veteran squad to try them out on. Trouble is they're just about all in black primer already, which I suspect might not help my inky aspirations.

Any advice?

You use them essentially like washes. Out of the bottle they'll be much more opaque, but can be thinned to a more transparent level than acrylic washes. The other main difference is that inks are glossy in finish compared to the matte of acrylic washes. This can be good if you're doing stuff like oil stains where you want a bit of gloss, but for normal shading you'll need to do a matte varnish layer at some point. Other than that, just get some test models and play around with them to see the subtle differences between inks and washes. A lot of it is simply personal preference on those subtle things.

The game color inks I've used actually aren't all that glossy. If you let them pool the pools will tend to be on the glossy side, but overall they're more of a satin or matte finish.

But yeah, inks are a bit like washes but they have much more dense colour to them. They're actually often very thin from a viscosity perspective, but denser in colour. If you want a more subtle effect like you get from a wash you have to thin them, it's usually best to thin with some sort of thinning medium rather than just water to avoid having an excessively high surface tension.

Usually with inks, similar to washes, you paint the model on the bright side and then apply the ink to give it depth and darken it. I sometimes use the model below to show the stark difference between inks and washes. It was painted initially with a light bone colour and then the pale skin areas are done with a brown wash (the old GW Devlan Mud wash) and then the much deeper brown on the brains and fleshy bits are done using a brown ink. So you can see how much deeper and darker the ink looks.




Just a general note for people buying inks, Game Color, P3 and artists inks are actually inks. Army painter used to label their paints as inks, but they're actually far more like washes than inks. Just looking at the Army painter site it looks like they've corrected their labelling and are now calling them washes.

I use them like normal paints, but only for the base coat. Some inks are very opaque and there is little to no difference to a normal heavily thinned paint, but it generates a supersmooth layer without brushstrokes, others are very transparent and create wonderful shading, just like a very strong wash. Great on a freshly (white) primed model, to get the first basecolor down and still see were to put hightlights and so on next.

I used inks on the inside of my tanks too. Nobody will have a longer look inside that dark tank besides me, but i wanted to have color in there...

Inks generate a very old school feeling: I can image painting a whole miniature with inks, without any shading and highlights, and it would look good and very old school! I'd image a lot of D&D figures in the 80s were painted like that.... you could finish a already primed miniture in 30minutes.

great stuff, if used well. I wish i had more colors.

 theCrowe wrote:
My sweet wife has bought me a Game Color Ink set for valentines. I've never used inks, mostly just plain acrylics, but I'm very interested to try these out and see how it works.

I've got 1:300 scale wwii aircraft, Goblins, wood elves or an IG veteran squad to try them out on. Trouble is they're just about all in black primer already, which I suspect might not help my inky aspirations.

Any advice?

If you have an airbrush, you can run them through it to give some color variety to metallics.

I use them only for base pat shading or when I need to wash a big surface or a large quantity of surfaces really quickly with only one layer. Just found all my old inks and will be using them this same way but also by thinning them with lahmian medium to make them a slight more transparent to be used as washes with a stronger pigment tone. Red ink will be used on my khorne miniatures as more of a final wash where as two layers of carroburg crimson wash will be used for the base coat shading. For my nurgle stuff I will use thinned green ink over bone colors(typically pallid wych flesh and screaming skull) or white to produce a nurgly rotting skin tone possibly in addition to a layer of Athenian camoshade(which I love but feel I need too many layers of to achieve the rotting greenish hued skin tone I am looking for.