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Hello all,

Quick question, does drying retarder (vallejo brand is what I have) work in acrylic varnish (I'm using Vallejo's acrylic satin varnish)?

Will that have the desired effect of increasing drying time without any adverse effects?

I want a reasonably thick tinted paint, but what I want to do with it I want slightly longer drying time than you typically get from an acrylic varnish so I can work with it a bit. The alternative is to buy a thick matte medium, but if the varnish will do what I want I'll just stick to that.

Cheers!

Honestly.... I'm not sure. I'd try it on a test piece and see how well it works.

Works well enough.

Most drying retarder is basically a slow to evaporate liquid like PEG. This keeps the acrylic molecules from forming a film and settling down as fast. Once it evaporates - it is gone and the film formed is just as strong as if you were to dilute it with plain water.

The different constituent parts that go into making a paint all more or less function without the other parts (though sometimes not as well). Since varnish is basically just the binder (generally with some flow aid type chemicals added for smooth finishes) you can add the retarder just as well.

 Sean_OBrien wrote:
Works well enough.

Most drying retarder is basically a slow to evaporate liquid like PEG. This keeps the acrylic molecules from forming a film and settling down as fast. Once it evaporates - it is gone and the film formed is just as strong as if you were to dilute it with plain water.

The different constituent parts that go into making a paint all more or less function without the other parts (though sometimes not as well). Since varnish is basically just the binder (generally with some flow aid type chemicals added for smooth finishes) you can add the retarder just as well.

Cool, thanks! I wasn't sure if acrylic varnish used a different type of resin to acrylic paint and didn't want to do it and have it do something funky down the track. I basically want to create some "clear" type paints, but using colours other than what you typically can buy and with a satin finish (most clears I've used are a glossy finish).

Keep in mind that one of the reasons most clears are glossy is because it is easier to make clears glossy.

The matting agents tend to have a bit of a white tone to them. This can make colors look dusty when you get them in a matte finish. Good bit of trial and error to get it spot on, so be sure to have a full bag of spoons to work on while you dial in your finish.

Will do, thanks for the tip.

Since you've already starting posting in this thread I might as well as ask, how would you go about creating clear type paints yourself? I really like the Gunze clears and I know I won't get anywhere near as good as that just mixing regular paint with varnish, drying retarder and thinning mediums, but that's basically what I'm doing

I'm no Sean_OBrien, but I'd add coloration with inks, if able, instead of paints, as they're naturally translucent while remaining vibrant. Add acrylic medium (or varnish, really), to taste, to add body and Bob's your uncle. From there, you should be able to tweak with flow improver/drying retarder, as usual.

Generally do the same.

You can get inks that are very strong - a little goes a long way in terms of coloring a clear varnish. They do tend to have a bit of shine, but some like Black Star from Dr. Martin are matte...so for making a black clear - it works fairly well.

Their Technical Drawing Inks are a bit glossy (like most inks) but are acrylic based (unlike most inks) with a liquid dye (unlike paints) and come in a good selection of colors for mixing. The Water Color Dyes are another good one for mixing clears - though you are working with a water color base and mixing it with an acrylic base.

When using regular paints...well, difficult. Your average paint will have a bunch of something like titanium white added to it in order to improve coverage. Some fine art paints will have pure pigment bases (Golden for example has regular and opaque versions of many of their colors...or regular and transparent depending on the pigment used).

You can also buy stuff like Mixol Tints. They are a pure pigment that will allow you to mix to your hearts content. They have no binder or other stuff though...so you can overload your varnish (for the most part though - you can go up to about 50/50 before the binder fails).

Round about way of saying...if you have an example of what you are shooting for, I might have a formula already worked out. Otherwise, it ends up being a little of this and a little of that. If I want to replicate what I did the last time - I will repeat the process...but more often then not, each time I mix up a bottle of clear (either as a clear paint, a custom wash type, a glaze...) I will do it a bit different from the last to try out new products and techniques.

If drying time is an issue then why not try oil paints? You can have hours to work with it if you want.

Thanks for the tips.

For what I wanted to use it for...

I mostly wanted to mix up some clears to use in a similar fashion to how I use the Gunze clears. On my Tyranids I currently use Burnt Umber inks on the fleshy bits and I was thinking building up further with a clear either instead or or in addition to the inks would add more depth and make it look more alien. Clears just have so much more body to them.

I also really like the Gunze clear black (smoke I think they call it?) and wanted something with a more brownish tinge.

Tinting canopies.

I also wanted to try highlighting and shading with clears. Maybe I'm just being crazy, but highlighting and shading with opaque paints seems a bit odd to me, as you're trying to impose lighting on model and often that works contrary to the actual real world lighting the model is viewed under. Something like an extreme highlight with opaque paint, looks cool when you photograph it in a light box, but when you view it in normal lighting if the light catches a spot other than the one you highlighted it looks strange.

So I wanted to try highlighting and shading with clears... because a clear has more body to it, so when natural light hits the painted shading, the shading is somewhat reduced, when the painted shading isn't hit by light it appears even darker and enhances the shading.

I dunno, I could be way off, it might not work at all. Mostly I just like how clears have body to them, I even wanted to try doing some airbrushed filters with clears as I think it will add more depth than doing a filter with an opaque paint. That's kind of why I wanted a more satin finish, otherwise the models end up super glossy.

I don't mind a bit of gloss, as I varnish afterwards anyway, it's just been my experience with the Gunze clears that even after a couple of thin layers of varnish the cleared areas still look glossy.

 Peregrine wrote:
If drying time is an issue then why not try oil paints? You can have hours to work with it if you want.

It's mostly just that acrylic varnishes dry in seconds, I would like to have minutes rather than seconds to work, I don't need hours though.

Hey everyone, just thought I'd post again because I finally tested this and yes it does work really well. It works best in satin varnish, do maybe 5 drops of satin varnish, 1 drop of retarder, then just a touch of your chosen paint (maybe half a drop to 1 drop) and then thin as necessary.

It gives you a nice, low opacity colour that you can build up, similar to how you do glazes but because it's thicker, you have more flexibility in how you use it. I've been using it for weathering, letting you build up muck which only obscures the underlying paint as much as you want it to (either with multiple layers or just applying it thicker).

It does also work with matte varnish, but you don't really get the depth that you normally associated with "clears" when you use it that way, with a matte varnish it's basically a flat, low opacity paint.

Thanks for the update! I was going to ask, how is this different from a glaze? Couldn't you just dilute your paint with Lahmian medium until you achieved the desired opacity and consistency, if the goal was to lower opacity?

It basically works like a clear, which is similar to a glaze. When I think of a glaze though, most of the medium evaporates off, so there's not much body to the paint, it's just a thin, low opacity layer of pigment.

A clear on the other hand has some body to it. It had some depth. Normally we want to get away from paint with depth But in the case of a clear the depth means that the paint appears different depending on how the light bounces off it. If the light strikes it sharply and reflects in to your eye, the underlying paint is more dominant. If you're looking at a shadow region which is mainly illuminated by diffused light, the underlying paint is hidden more and the colour of the clear is more apparent.

I'm still working on it, but part of the idea was to create shading that compliments natural lighting rather than fighting against it. The problem I'm having is it works great with gloss varnish (but you don't necessarily want glossy models), good with satin varnish, but then with matte varnish it kind of loses it's depth.

Also I like it for airbrushing filters, it lets you airbrush a very faint filter across the whole model and build it up more in the crevices. You can kind of do this just with regular paint, but by the time you thin it to the point where there's low enough pigment for it to work, you're practically just spraying coloured water, by adding the varnish and drying retarder you thicken up the paint enough so that it sprays a bit better.

Huh. Learn something new every day

Thanks for the info -- I'll give it a try some time!