Materials
Most hobbyists use acrylic paint, maybe artists' paint (such as Daler Rowney's Cryla) but more often that sold especially for painting minis and other scale models (such as Acrylicos Vallejo's Model Color and Game Color or Games Workshop's Citadel Colour). Some mini painters use enamel paint (e.g., Humbrol or Testors) or even artists' oil paint. Some hobbyists use synthetic Lacquer paints, such as Gunze-Sangyo's Mr. Color paint line. Lacquer paints are less commonly available in the United States due to safety issues.
Because the properties of oils, enamels, lacquers, and acrylics differ, different techniques suit different paints. Each kind of paint has a different thinner, used to thin the paint for a smoother coverage, and maybe to clean brushes. For acrylic water is used, for enamels enamel thinners or white spirit, for lacquer lacquer thinner and for oil paints white spirit. Thinners for thinning is added to the paint using an eye-dropper (pipette) or similar to avoid contaminating one color with another.
Different agents can be used with different kinds of paint. Retarder makes paints slower drying. Water-based inks can be used for washes. Flow aid is used with acrylics and inks. This reduces the surface tension of the water, to improve washes. Figures are very often varnished, especially if they will be used for game play.
Gloss varnishes are harder wearing than matte varnishes, but matte varnish often gives a more realistic finish. Exceptions are naturally glossy materials, such as polished leather and metals, and wet surfaces. Some enthusiasts use matte varnish over gloss varnish. This can also minimize the tendency of matte varnish to form a whitish residue when applied directly to paint.
Read more about this topic: Figure Painting (hobby)
Famous quotes containing the word materials:
“If our entertainment culture seems debased and unsatisfying, the hope is that our children will create something of greater worth. But it is as if we expect them to create out of nothing, like God, for the encouragement of creativity is in the popular mind, opposed to instruction. There is little sense that creativity must grow out of tradition, even when it is critical of that tradition, and children are scarcely being given the materials on which their creativity could work”
—C. John Sommerville (20th century)
“In how few words, for instance, the Greeks would have told the story of Abelard and Heloise, making but a sentence of our classical dictionary.... We moderns, on the other hand, collect only the raw materials of biography and history, “memoirs to serve for a history,” which is but materials to serve for a mythology.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Artists, whatever their medium, make selections from the abounding materials of life, and organize these selections into works that are under the control of the artist.... In relation to the inclusiveness and literally endless intricacy of life, art is arbitrary, symbolic and abstracted. That is its value and the source of its own kind of order and coherence.”
—Jane Jacobs (b. 1916)