Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you:
No adverts like this in the forums anymore.
Times and dates in your local timezone.
Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance.
Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely.
Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net.
If you are already a member then feel free to login now.
I have been buying more stuff on ebay, including two job lots of paint. amongst the paints available were a highly disproportionate number of pots of Abaddon Black and Macragge Blue. There is a glut on these due to the rollout of 40K Conquest in several European countries, meaning a sudden rush of Issue 1 copies which includes three paints for a few Euro. I have lots of paint on the cheap, but also a large number of pots I dont actually need.
Now I am starting a Crimson Fists army which requires the slightly darker Kantor Blue. Now I have some Kantor Blue, but not anything like as much Macragge Blue and Abaddon Black, so this gets me thinking. Why not mix my own? Now mixing paint is problematic, you only get the same colour mix once, but if I pour several pots of Macragge Blue and one pot of Abaddon Black into a suitable bottle, I have one mix for my army.
It seems reaasonable, but I thought to ask Dakka first.
1. What ratio of Blue to black would you recommend? Is there any way to calculate, apparently where each paint is measurable on a colour chart and I wonder if there is a calculation I can make that might give me a heads up on the estimate.
2. What are the consequences of pouring several pots of paint into a container, would the whole process cause the paint to congeal, do I need to choose materials carefully. Anyone recommend a source of transferable paint pots, if necessary.
3. Does mixing whole pots actually work? I havent done this before. If I were to mix rwo or more paints into one container and shake, will it result in an even colour throughout. I havent tried this on this scale before. Is there something I have missed?
4. Anything else I need to know.
Thank you Dakka.
n'oublie jamais - It appears I now have to highlight this again.
It is by tea alone I set my mind in motion. By the juice of the brew my thoughts aquire speed, my mind becomes strained, the strain becomes a warning. It is by tea alone I set my mind in motion.
Simply Mixing macragge and abaddon will not get you kantor. Paint mixing isn't that simple. Black can often kill colours. It will definitely dull the blue, most likely just giving you a darker, duller version of macragge. Kantor blue is dark but rich. My knowledge of mixing paint is limited to my experience on a pallette, but I know batch paint mixing is highly specialised. I'd be more inclined to suggest mixing your blue with a very dark purple or green. advise against just throwing a load of black into some blue, as you'll likely end up with a dirty, unusable mess. Just keep your macragge for your highlights.
Ok. Now I still want to throw about 4 Macragge into a larger pot and mix them with something. I will be able to spare them I have over a dozen pots of Macragge Blue now. I also know I will only get the same colour once, so I must batch enough for all my Crimson Fists plus extra to spare. I can even afford to do this up to twice, so I can keep whatever colour I get if not Kantor and go again and still have enough Macragge left over in its own pots for whatever use they are.
Anyone able to calculate the mixer paint from a paint chart so I can hopefully get it right, or close enough to Kantor that it works, first time.
n'oublie jamais - It appears I now have to highlight this again.
It is by tea alone I set my mind in motion. By the juice of the brew my thoughts aquire speed, my mind becomes strained, the strain becomes a warning. It is by tea alone I set my mind in motion.
You'd have to experiment mixing the blue with various colours to see what you get. I'd suggest caliban green, maybe some sort of dark purple, a dark reddy brown, and see how it goes. From there you can see if any mixes are appropriate.
Alternatively, I've heard that some GW will accept new unopene products as trade in stores. You could go to your local store and see if you could swap them for kantor.
Alternatively, I've heard that some GW will accept new unopene products as trade in stores. You could go to your local store and see if you could swap them for kantor.
They do, but not for paint. I was allowed to get away with it once, and swap any ten paints, and that was because the policy change was unclear. This was while buying the £2 Issue 1 of Conquest myself, as did many many others. GW was blindsided by this but swiftly made a large scale ruling, no swaps on paints without receipts for paints. Some were able to negotiate one-offs.
They are especially wary of swaps of Retributor Armour, Macragge Blue and Abaddon Black. It doesnt matter to me. Black is such a useful colour to have extra of, and Retributor Armour can be very expensive. I just bought another 11 pots of Retributor armour in ebay for £13 inc postage as the klast wavesrollouts of Issue One disappear these opprtunities will disappear. Despite having about six and winning another bid which gave me another five. I will give away two or three keep several in reserve and mix up a nice large pot of copper/bronze paint for a steampunk terrain project which would otherwise not be achievable due to usual cost of quality metallics. A lot of people like Vallejo paints, they are good, but none of the major manufacturers do metals was well as Citadel do. I have zero problems having 'too much' Retributor armour, the only downside is that while you can add colour to a metal paint you cant so easily return it to silver/steel. IIRC all the old metal paints were Mithril Silver plus a colourant, I assume the same is still true.
n'oublie jamais - It appears I now have to highlight this again.
It is by tea alone I set my mind in motion. By the juice of the brew my thoughts aquire speed, my mind becomes strained, the strain becomes a warning. It is by tea alone I set my mind in motion.
We don't have Regal Blue yet (There's several potential big changes coming with Alpha soon that will affect all lines bar the metallics), however for Kantor Blue, Our Marianas Blue is the direct match from our collection
Thankyou for answering someones bat signal. I am looking for advice and I am in the market for large paint bottles, but not for paint per se.
I want to mix up my own Regal Blue/Kantor Blue from a large supply of Macragge Blue I happen to have. I am looking ofr a large pot because with freemix I can only get the same hue once, so I want the eventual batch to be as big as possible to last any repaints and extensions to my Crimson Fist army.
n'oublie jamais - It appears I now have to highlight this again.
It is by tea alone I set my mind in motion. By the juice of the brew my thoughts aquire speed, my mind becomes strained, the strain becomes a warning. It is by tea alone I set my mind in motion.
I've got to wonder if it's worth it. You're saving a maximum of about a tenner compared to just buying a big bottle from Instar or where-ever. And you'll still have the problem of trying to reproduce the exact shade you've achieved if you run out.
Crispy78 wrote: I've got to wonder if it's worth it. You're saving a maximum of about a tenner compared to just buying a big bottle from Instar or where-ever. And you'll still have the problem of trying to reproduce the exact shade you've achieved if you run out.
I often find slight variations of hues to give more naturalistic results for the army as a whole. But YMMV.
I argue that if I do this once, I only need to get the mix right once.And in the volumes I will be working with, likely minimum of five pots of Macragge Blue, I can get the results quite fine.
Yes I will do small swatches and skchsan suggests. It seems the best way to do it. However I do want one base colour throughout. Yes colour variance is natural, but there is likely nothing natural about the colour of the armour worn by Astartes and variation might not even be tolerated in canon..
This throws some mud on what I am about to say. When I mix I will make my Kantor Blue, it is intended to be very close to Kantor Blue, but quite likely there will be a colour difference noticable if my army is compared to a Crimson Fist army painted in shop bought colours. I have zero problems with that, and it puts an individual stamp on my army, while keeping it internally uniform.
Is this worth it? Yes I think so. GW paint is not cheap and I now post buying an auction lot which includes seven Macragge Blue plus according to my inventory log (yes I keep one) is another seven pots I already had; so I have fourteen pots of Macragge Blue. Normally I would have a fraction of this, but they featured in a lot of good value purchases: 40K Conquest subscription, extra copies of Issue One, two 40K Paint and Tools sets, previous job lots on eBay, the 2018 Christmas paint & box deal from GW, and now this trade have left me with a lot of this particular colour, and my current total is after I had already given away several pots in the last year.
Macragge Blue/Ultramarines Blue a very good heraldic blue so I will keep some pots as is even though ironically it not a colour I use much for anything except my Couronne themed Bretonnians. But I can well afford to sacrifice five or more pots for custom Kantor. Ironically I have a single pot of Kantor from the AOS Paint and Tools set, which it looks like I will be using only to create the swatch. Though I could pour it into the eventual mix to further 'Kantorise' the paint.
This message was edited 2 times. Last update was at 2020/02/04 17:54:10
n'oublie jamais - It appears I now have to highlight this again.
It is by tea alone I set my mind in motion. By the juice of the brew my thoughts aquire speed, my mind becomes strained, the strain becomes a warning. It is by tea alone I set my mind in motion.
queen_annes_revenge wrote: I honestly think you're going to be pushing water uphill with this endeavour mate. I'd just try to sell the paint and buy genuine kantor instead.
Ok. You make it sound like that I will encounter difficulties. I am curious as to what I might be missing.
Also Macragge Blue doesnt sell, there is a glut of the stuff.
n'oublie jamais - It appears I now have to highlight this again.
It is by tea alone I set my mind in motion. By the juice of the brew my thoughts aquire speed, my mind becomes strained, the strain becomes a warning. It is by tea alone I set my mind in motion.
queen_annes_revenge wrote: I honestly think you're going to be pushing water uphill with this endeavour mate. I'd just try to sell the paint and buy genuine kantor instead.
Ok. You make it sound like that I will encounter difficulties. I am curious as to what I might be missing.
Also Macragge Blue doesnt sell, there is a glut of the stuff.
The big difficulty comes from how most hobby paints are made.
If you go to the artist's paints (cadnium red, pthalo blue, ultramarine blue, etc), these are made with ONE pigment each. This allows for easy mixing.
Hobby paints almost always use two or more pigments to get the final color. As was mentioned, Kantor Blue does not just include a blue pigment, but a purple or violet one and quite likely a red. This means that as you mix in other paints with their own mix of pigments, you usually wind up getting your color desaturated (as greys form and turn your color into a pastel), or muddy it as browns form. Neither are good for getting the strong blue tone you want.
If you really need Kantor Blue in mass quantity and don't want to pay GW prices, there are two options.
1) Take your Kantor Blue to the craft shop and buy a similar craft paint. The pigment density is lower, yes, but careful thinning and layering fix that problem... and you should be thinning your paints anyway. What takes two coats of properly thinned GW paint may take three or four coats of craft paint thinned properly. But since GW paints cost - what, $3 for .4 oz? - and craft paints run between 75 cents and a buck fifty for five times as much, you still come out way ahead.
2) Take your Kantor Blue to the hardware or paint shop and have them custom match a quart (32 oz; 80 times a GW pot) or even a gallon (128 oz; 320 times a GW pot) of it. Just make sure you specify acrylic medium, not oil or latex. Again, you'll need to thin it down to the proper consistency, and even so it'll still be a thicker coat than either craft or hobby paints as it's designed to cover walls, not minis. On the other hand, a primer may not be necessary. Probably wuld be best to test a sacrificial subject first; most paint stores will sell you a small sample can for a buck or two to test with. It'll be a rather high initial investment... but you're unlikely to use up a quart, much less a gallon, and the color will match all the way to the end.
Thank you for your insights Vulcan. Does mixing paint with too many pigments cause it to go a funny colour immediately or over time?
I can well afford to sacrifice a pot of Macragge Blue on experiments, and most tests wont even need that much.
n'oublie jamais - It appears I now have to highlight this again.
It is by tea alone I set my mind in motion. By the juice of the brew my thoughts aquire speed, my mind becomes strained, the strain becomes a warning. It is by tea alone I set my mind in motion.
Orlanth wrote: Thank you for your insights Vulcan. Does mixing paint with too many pigments cause it to go a funny colour immediately or over time?
I can well afford to sacrifice a pot of Macragge Blue on experiments, and most tests wont even need that much.
It will be immediate, but the effects might be more (or possibly less) visible after it dries and the acrylic medium gets out of the way.
Pigments appear to be the color we see them as because they reflect that wavelength or wavelengths of visible light, and absorb all the other wavelengths. A paint with multiple pigments both reflects and absorbs more wavelengths, in proportion to the pigments involved (it's much more involved than that, but this is the basics).
When you mix two paints with multiple pigments, you get a big assortment of pigments absorbing and reflecting all together. Sometimes the wavelengths reflected interfere with each other, causing your eye to perceive a more pastel tone. Sometimes everything reflects together in varying proportions causing your eye to see brown.
And sometimes you get lucky and the resulting color actually is what you were hoping for. But there's no way to know short of testing.
We're all up for experimenting and there's no reason why you shouldn't try (And also don't take this as we're pushing our product onto you )
Getting an exact colour just by mixing other colours together is not as easy as it sound, especially when it comes to black as you can get pure,neutral blacks or blacks that lean to the blue side of the colour spectrum giving you very different results.
Here's a good example of trying to match a simple flesh colour
You might find you'd end up wasting more paint than you actually create as colour mixing from standard paints is always problematic.
Then there is also the case that you could be potentially mixing 8 different pigments together, a little bit here or there doesn't cause an immediate problems, but if you have two pigments that are opposite ends of the spectrum, you'll just end up with a grey colour eventually.
But by all means, experiment away, if anything you'll learn a lot on the way and if you do end up running out of paint after you're done, you know where we are
Vulcan wrote: [
The big difficulty comes from how most hobby paints are made.
If you go to the artist's paints (cadnium red, pthalo blue, ultramarine blue, etc), these are made with ONE pigment each. This allows for easy mixing.
Hobby paints almost always use two or more pigments to get the final color. As was mentioned, Kantor Blue does not just include a blue pigment, but a purple or violet one and quite likely a red. This means that as you mix in other paints with their own mix of pigments, you usually wind up getting your color desaturated (as greys form and turn your color into a pastel), or muddy it as browns form. Neither are good for getting the strong blue tone you want.
This is what I was trying to say, but lacking of the technical knowledge to do so haha.
Supershandy wrote: We're all up for experimenting and there's no reason why you shouldn't try (And also don't take this as we're pushing our product onto you )
Getting an exact colour just by mixing other colours together is not as easy as it sound, especially when it comes to black as you can get pure,neutral blacks or blacks that lean to the blue side of the colour spectrum giving you very different results.
Here's a good example of trying to match a simple flesh colour
I suspected there was something more to this than just mixing two paints together and getting a new colour on the colour wheel proportionate to the mix. However I never understood how or why. Thank you for this.
I am glad I made this thread rather than just mixed paint blindly.
One pot of Macragge Blue will shortly be sacrificed, if it works all well and good, if it fails I will have to suck up the cost and buy Kantor, but the advantage of that is I can buy Kantor as I need it one pot at a time. I keep a painting log of what paints I use for uniform colours, and also for basing, it solves a lot of problems later.
n'oublie jamais - It appears I now have to highlight this again.
It is by tea alone I set my mind in motion. By the juice of the brew my thoughts aquire speed, my mind becomes strained, the strain becomes a warning. It is by tea alone I set my mind in motion.
You probably don't need to sacrifice the whole pot to see if you can get a mix you can live with. You get the same color mixing drops as you do mixing whole pots in the same proportion.
Start with, say, five drops Maccragge Blue and one of a deep purple and go from there. So long as you keep careful track of how many drops of what you use, you will be able to recreate any color you create that way with around 90-95% accuracy.