Mixing with water?

[Quidis]

I recently bought the dvds from Miniature Mentor (http://www.miniaturementor.com/), and he paints with alot of water mixed in his paint.

As i liked his results i thought i should try this. When he paints he get a thin layer of even paint/water all over the area, but when i try my paint/water mix tends to go into the deepest area which creates an uneven result and tends to remove all the small details.

Any ideas why?

He uses mostly GW/Citadel colors, i use Vallejo \"game color\", could that be the reason, or am i doing something wrong?

 

[alextheartist]

What you want to do is wipe the brush onto some kitchen towel untill there is no barely any moisture left and when you brsh it on it is very thin.

Alex

 

[Corvus]

yes that\'s it: too much paint on your brush.

 

[farseer oliver]

Yup, too much paint on the brush will not work. You should brush it on a tissue to absorb the paint away till its like only moisture wet.

If you still don\'t get the idea, a good example will be the table cloth. Every time you want to wipe the table before/after meal, you wash the cloth with water and then squeeze out the water till it only moisture wet. And when you wipe the table, you will notice that the water on the table dry up very fast.

Hope you get the idea

 

[DaN]

@ Oliver - this is assuming he cleans the table or even that he sits at it to eat

@ Quidis - sounds like these that IS your problem. I was going to suggest using additives with your water, but I don\'t think you need them as I believe you just want to paint very thin layers of glazed colour - right?

 

[Einion]

Surely the vid must show the painter unloading the brush?

Einion

 

[Pelorat]

No, disappointingly, MM doesn\'t ever actually show that, and it took me a while to figure out how to do it. They do show the thinned paint, though, and that helped a lot.

What I did was load the brush with water so it looks \'fat\', then drain it on the towel just till the point gets sharp but still keeping quite a bit of water in it. Then I load a tiny bit of paint, and then drain off most of the rest of the water and test it on a hard surface. If it dumps a blob of paint, I dry it off just a tiny bit more until the paint doesn\'t jump off the brush uncontrollably. Eventually I figured out where the right mix was.

Hard to explain, but once you get your system going you\'ll never have to worry about it again. You\'ll get to the point where you can tell just by looking at it. It\'ll just take a bit of time.

 

[Einion]

Originally posted by Pelorat
No, disappointingly, MM doesn\'t ever actually show that...

Bloody \'ell!

<rhetorical question>
What\'s the use of a how-to vid if you don\'t actually show everything?
</rhetorical question>


Einion

 

[Pelorat]

What it does show is quite helpful to noobs like me, but yeah, they could have done more.