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As the title suggests, is it possible to glaze effectively with mettalic paints if you dilute it with glaze medium for example? I never tried it with glaze medium or similar products, but I tried diluting my metallics with water and they always become sort of grainy and I don't get a satisfactory result.

Does anyone have some experence in this?

You can, sorta. Are you trying to create a colored metallic panel or give a colored panel a metallic sheen? Vallejo makes metallic medium which will make a colored paint sparkle if that's what you want. You may also try mixing a bright metallic with the contrast paints if you're going for a metallic colored paint. Are you looking for something like a metallic automotive finish?

Water isn't the best thing to use for a glaze, you want to thin a paint with medium. I've tried to do this on swords or orbs to make them look sparkly and the metallic flakes will sometimes drip or pool so I lost the effect I was going for.

Yeah the question is about what you are wanting to do with them... You can glaze anything; you can glaze toothpaste if you want. Whether or not it'll give a desired effect is a different matter.

If you are trying to give something a metallic sheen, you're better off glazing with another paint over a metal base, imo

Edit: to expand on the above a little bit - metallic 'flakes' in paint don't really work in the same way as standard pigments. Metalloc flakes don't do a very good job of spreading themselves thinly amd evenly; even when painting them on quite thickly the 'sparkle' can be very patchy. This is especially obvious if you apply multiple thin layers of metallic paints; you'll notice that even if you have total 'opacity' with a metallic paint, subsequent layers can still improve the 'shine', even if adding an extra layer doesn't change the colour of the surface.

If you try to glaze thinly with metallics, I don't think you will ever get a nice uniform Metallic sparkle - it'll be patchy. Again, it's about what you want to achieve; maybe you want patchy. If you don't want the metalloc flakes to apply in a patchy way, then you need to lay them down in a high quantity, hence using the metallic paint as a baselayer and then working over it.

Thank you for the advice. What I am trying to do is blend two shades of silver together. I am not very good at wet blening, so I wanted to do it in a slow and controlled way via glazing, but I was not sure if I can achieve that gradient between two colours (say leadbelcher and stormhost silver) when I glaze with metallics due to their properties.

Be aware that leadbelcher is a heavier paint than Stormhost or Runefang so I would lay down the Leadbelcher first. Because the metallics have little sparkling flakes it’s matter of getting the “glitter” to transition so try using medium to thin it and don’t load up your brush too much so it won’t run or drip.

I tried doing almost the same thing with a sword and by thinning it with water I got splotchy streaks. If you practice with some sprue you might get the transition you’re looking for but at this point given my huge paint backlog I’ve sorta settled for using shades to darken my metals. I haven’t got time to glaze metal transitions LOL

You need metallic medium to thin metallic paints; GW doesn’t have one atm, so look up other brands, available at local hobby lobby.

Tiberias wrote:
Thank you for the advice. What I am trying to do is blend two shades of silver together. I am not very good at wet blening, so I wanted to do it in a slow and controlled way via glazing, but I was not sure if I can achieve that gradient between two colours (say leadbelcher and stormhost silver) when I glaze with metallics due to their properties.

In my experience, that would be very difficult to do via glazing with metallics. I'm sure there's someone out there who has a way to do it but I have not found one! If it were me, I'd probably wet blend it, but if that's not something you are comfortable doing, then the next best thing would be glazing a non-metallic colour over the silver. Using Constrast paints or inks over metals work really well, and you could very effectively glaze a transition from silver to leadbelcher-ish colour by glazing black or grey over part of it. Both inks and Contrast paints are pretty good at not killing the metallic shine, so it should give the desired effect.

You don't need to glaze to do that, just layer the lighter metallics over the base. That's how I do all my metallics. Mix your lighter silver into your base and layer it over in increasing amounts.

Thank you for all the advice! Really helped me out quite a bit.

 queen_annes_revenge wrote:
You don't need to glaze to do that, just layer the lighter metallics over the base. That's how I do all my metallics. Mix your lighter silver into your base and layer it over in increasing amounts.

When using this method, how many layers do you usually lay down until you get a nice transition?

For metallics I find its not many.. I usually do 5-10 for something like a sword, but you could get a nice enough one with 3-4