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What in your opinion is the hardest to paint for colors? Like, how getting that coat to be perfectly solid, clean, fresh, Candy coated toy manufacturer quality painted on....you know what I mean.

Out of all the colors, which is the hardest to get done right?

My Vote goes for bright yellows, After a failed attempt at trying to use the citidel spray gun, painting it on in thin layers after layers, Trying a yellow thick medium undercoat. Dry brushing...I gave up on the yellow.

Yellow is fething impossible without a spray can and that is how I am gonna do Yellow on tanks from now on. Just spray and done!

What do you think?

Depends what you mean by "hardest". Hardest to get a smooth coat is one thing, hardest to make look good is another.

Yellow is probably the hardest to get a smooth coat on. But if you're struggling, try to use Averland Sunset as a base. It's how I paint pretty much all my yellow now, makes it much easier. 2-3 thin coats of Averland Sunset will cover black pretty well. If you can use white as a primer it helps as well, but IMO if you have a black base it's not worth the effort of painting it white first and then painting it yellow, just paint it Averland Sunset and be done with it. You can also base brown.

Hardest to actually make look good... I'd have to say grey. It's really hard to make grey look good IMO. Other colours you can choose to either contrast different colours OR you can simply go light to dark and get a lot of contrast within the one colour. But grey, I dunno, I just find it really hard to give it the level of contrast I want and it never turns out looking how I wanted it to look.

Bright yellows, no doubt. My bad moonz arent that bad since i prime them yellow and they end up with a very dull, worn out yellow after all the washing i do but ive tried giving my Tau a yellow theme and it gave me a headache. It always ALWAYS had brush streaks unless i had it a darker yellow, which made it look dirty and not very tau-like.

I dont even have this issue with White, which is funny. My tau DO have white, albeit not much (its a high-lighting thing, i'd say 5% of the model is straight white if that much). Yellow is such a nightmare.

Yellow. Red and white aren't strong colors, either, but yellow always takes the most work to build up strongly and evenly.

Purple for me. Using P3 paints, yellow and red are actually fairly easy to get right.

I'll agree with the above, once read the question the first word that popped "yellow". Then white, but yellow's the hardest by far, no wonder I see so few minis painted with that.

And I'm just getting into Alaitoc Eldar... Yellow helmets on a black base coat and blue layers and no painting skills to call my own. I'm gonna be screwed.

 SharkoutofWata wrote:
And I'm just getting into Alaitoc Eldar... Yellow helmets on a black base coat and blue layers and no painting skills to call my own. I'm gonna be screwed.

Seriously, Averland Sunset

Do the black basecoat, 2-3 thin layers of Averland Sunset with a nice large brush, highlight by mixing in a bit of white and that will give you a dullish yellow. If you want to make it a bright yellow, hit it was a yellow glaze.

This is similar to how I have been doing some of my Orks, these were black base, 2-3 coats of Averland Sunset for the flames, and then paint the flame tips in orange then I spent a bit of time blending the orange and yellow together. The take home message is that even from a black base it was pretty simple to do.

Its really not THAT bad. Just paint the model and ave the helmet for last. If you really want to, paint it bleached bone or light light grey first, but averland sunset thinned down does work well. I follow it with yreil yellow and then drybrush the whole thing with flash gitz.

My yellow may not be the most flat, uniform thing, but you get really cool colors mixed together and from 2-3 feet away they have texture, which i prefer much more than having everything the color of urine.

it really depends on how much of a rush you are in, in my experience...
i paint dark to light, so the colors are built up over a few layers of progressively lighter colors...
it makes bright colors easy to paint, but takes more time to build up...

as gokhm said, P3's make painting bright colors a treat, since they have a very strong liquid pigment, which covers really well...

a standard yellow recipe for me would be black undercoat, Battlefield Brown basecoat, Gun Corps Brown layer, Heartfire layer, Cygnus Yellow layer, Cygnus + Morrow White highlight...

for something like the hazard stripes on power cables, i don't bother with shading, but for something like Bad Moon armor, i like to shade with a glaze of Bloodstone, which is a really nice red-brown that gives the yellow some "life"...

of course, in the OP's case, talking about vehicles, it is always going to be a pain to get smooth colors over such a large surface without the use of a spray can, airbrush, or failing that, a really big brush!!!

personally, i think a lot of the troubles that painters have with a certain color is down to a lack of patience to see the end result they have in their head...
i know i had this problem in the beginning, and it led to a lot of frustration...
once i slowed down, and decided to build up colors, instead of trying to jump to the desired look, painting got a lot less frustrating...

cheers
jah

Yellow is a pain for me, It's a wonder why I play Imperial Fists. It discouraged me enough to give up painting yellow for a while, I have been painting a Ultramarines army for a friend. I am VERY jealous of how easy Ultramarines are compared to Imperial Fists.

gohkm wrote:
Purple for me. Using P3 paints, yellow and red are actually fairly easy to get right.

PM me and I can tell you how to fix your purples. Once you pick up on a few things it gets pretty easy.

And I agree that if you are going to paint yellow use the P3 paints. Most colors I use Vallejo but yellow I use P3 all the way. Usually I start with the light brown undercoat.