AllSeeingSkink wrote:

 Lance845 wrote:
What GW calls a Ink is also commonly called a wash. It's paint with a very low pigment count. You can actually purchase stuff from other companies called varnish. For instance, Army Painter Matte Varnish. It's just paint without pigment. Likewise, Ard'Coat is just Gloss Varnish. Very expensive gloss varnish. If you add a bunch of varnish to a GW paint you will make a Ink out of it. You can do something similar by adding distilled water, but you are just adding to the base, diluting all the parts of the paint that make it paint instead of water. You might want that though. Some paints are thick and the distilled water can help it flow better.

That's not quite right.

Inks traditionally are thin and have high colour density. This is how an acrylic ink behaves...




Washes are kind of a more recent addition to wargaming, they have much lower colour density than inks... but the confusing thing is some companies (like army painter) use the term "ink" for what we normally think of as a "wash". But traditionally, inks are much denser colour.

I posted this in the other thread, but I'll post it again here. If you look at this guy, the brains, tubes and fleshy bits are Rakarth Flesh with an old GW brown INK painted over the top. The skin areas areas are Rakarth Flesh with a newer GW wash painted over it. As you can see the area painted with the ink has completely changed the colour of the Rakarth Flesh while the washed area is only slightly altered the tone.



Of course it's complicated by the fact that a lot of companies now make wash-like products that they call inks but actually behave nothing like traditional artist inks.

If you add a bunch of varnish to a GW paint you will make a Ink out of it.

That's not really true either. Varnishes usually have much higher viscosity than inks and washes and also higher surface tension. Varnishes are typically "acrylic resin" or similar where as to make a wash you need to add some amount of "acrylic medium" (which includes a binder, not just the resin) and also some sort of "thinning medium" (which might just be water) and then something to lower the surface tension (something like a flow improver, or in the good old days a tiny touch of dish washing liquid). You can then add a matting agent to dull it down because acrylic mediums and flow improvers are often glossy.

If you want to make something akin to a traditional artists ink, you can't do that by mixing something in with regular paint because inks typically use a high density of very fine pigments and/or dyes.

So yeah, varnishes behave very different to washes and inks because they're made of fundamentally different building blocks. Some varnishes can work as thinners (Future for example, or Humbrol's Clear) but those are the exception rather than the rule because they are varnishes that are exceptionally thin to begin with, but even they often don't have the low surface tension that is desirable in a wash/ink.

EDIT: As for clears, clears are usually a vibrant pigment, but only a very small amount of it, mixed in with a large amount of acrylic medium. So a few coats of a "clear" will usually give you a very bright vibrant colour, but because the density is low the colour underneath will still be visible through it and also because of the large amount of acrylic medium or resin it will have some depth to it (areas that you view squarely will appear lighter than areas you view at an angle). I'd describe clears as being similar to traditional artist inks but with a higher viscosity, higher surface tension and lower colour density. It's what you'd imagine you'd get if you mixed a bit of paint in with a gloss varnish, BUT there's more to it than that (because I've never been able to create my own clears that look as good as commercially available clears like Tamiya's options).

If you look at some of Forge World's models, they use clears over metallics to create some candy effects, for example...



That's achieved by painting red clear over a silver basecoat, while this is achieved by painting a blue-green clear over a silver basecoat: