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Hi all, looking for anyone who's got some experience to share on color change paints on minis. I'm looking at some hotrod inspired colors for my Ambots (because gangs) and wondered if anyone has tried something like this before?

I only have experiance with dark cool blues.

If you look at greenstuff worlds youtube channel they have some tutorials. From what I remember they want to go onto to high gloss black primer.

If you look at the link in my sig you can see the wave serpents I did.

 Argive wrote:
I only have experiance with dark cool blues.

If you look at greenstuff worlds youtube channel they have some tutorials. From what I remember they want to go onto to high gloss black primer.

If you look at the link in my sig you can see the wave serpents I did.

Ok, watched thier vids.

What I had in mind was flat black to base colors to color change, to decals, to glosscoat. The manufacturer just recommends a dark base coat, as its's a gloss spray

Pretty much that. I use goldens green orange for my nid shells. I prime all my models in black and apply a single coat of the green-orange over the top. Clear coat to protect it and call it good.

I experimented painting different colors on a spare bit and then painted the whole thing with the color change to see what effect it had.

I recomend you do the same so you know what your in for.

Here's a question I've pondered, should I have decals under the color change effect, or over it before applying gloss? In theory it would 'blend' better, but I'm not sure given the unusual nature of the project compared to my usual flat paints, rust spots, and bullet holes.

Hot rods are something I'll be honest I have far less familiarity with than military vehicles.

a few small tips

-dont highlight colourshifts. the shift is the highlight. you can shade but only do pinwash.
-on miniatures, the intensity of the shift effect realy depends on the lightsource and how mutch curves the model has.
-all of them are ment to be used over gloss black. you can use other colours as primers, but then you need to experiment but that allso means the colours will be mutch weaker.

We have quite a fair bit of experience with these, but we're phasing them out to make way for our SPECTRUM line which allows you to create your own colour shifting metallics just by mixing them into standard metallics or by painting over the top of normal paint. We lost count of the number of variations that can be created at 10,000....

Anyway, in the case of colourshifting they don't require any highlighting as this is all done by the metallic itself so it'd be a waste of time...If you are adamant in doing it though, a simple silver should be all you'll need.

While the general consensus is to do it over gloss black, you may not need to depending on how many layers you wish to apply, if you make it opaque enough, having a gloss black primer or coat is a little pointless. We've put an image here of or Green Gold shifting material on (From Left to Right) Black Matt Primer, Grey Matt Primer and White Matt Primer. You can see from the difference in colour how much the effect changes though the lighter you go, the more coats you'll require to be able to see the effect



To give you an example of our new Spectrum range, this is a mock up Alpha Legion scheme we did by painting Green Shift over our Gray Blue, The effect is pretty striking (It was only a rough test so not C&C needed )



We're phasing out or current colourshift materials and planning to have a sale on them soon, but I wouldn't recommend Greenstuff Worlds paints, I've heard a lot of people have a lot of trouble working with them, Turbodork on the other hand I've heard do some pretty nice ones though

INSTAR Paints sells color shifting paints. They are pretty good, I have a couple of them.

It really depends what you're going to paint. Most 32mm miniatures are too small to make good use of the color shift effect, though Nids/Necrons/Primaris should work. It's better for larger vehicles and models where you get big curvatures.

I can also vouch for Instar- not great photos and I’m away from home so I can’t take a better one until tomorrow afternoon, but this is their blue/purple flip paint.

Go *very* dark to get the purple, just a little silver highlighting will bring out the blue:

Used GSW Burning Gold on my Custodes and Contemptor Dread, with results I'm pretty happy with. Went over with a few coats to get a solid effect.

Color shift paints are notoriously terrible in photographs and always look far better in person.

Just saying.

 Lance845 wrote:
Color shift paints are notoriously terrible in photographs and always look far better in person.

Just saying.

Oh we couldn't agree with this more, we've tried multiple light sources, angles, settings etc but can we capture what you see with the eye.....

I ditto these comments

 Lance845 wrote:
Color shift paints are notoriously terrible in photographs and always look far better in person.

Just saying.

One of the reasons I'm doing the second one as strictly a metallic blue.