Thinning Paint....

[Briggsy]

Hi All,

Hope everyone is well.....I've been busy painting my army so haven't been online in a little while. Just a quick question regarding the above, would you say it's true that some of the "colors" range produced by citadel don't need thinning?

I've noticed that when I did thin some of them that it was too thin, so I have a method of judging what needs thinning and what doesn't.

Basically when I take the paint out of the pot with my brush and apply a stroke on my pallet, if I notice that the paint "shrinks" I can tell the paint has enough water inside it already. If it doesn't "shrink" and stays reasonably thick on the pallet I thin down accordingly.

Would you say that was a good method?

Thanks

[snowblizz]

There's no hard and fast method really. It's a lot of guesswork, but I think what you suggest could work.

Paints vary a lot in consistency, so one can't be too general, but yeah sometimes you don't need to thin them. An older pot of paint will have lost a lot of moisture already eg. And GW's paint sit on the shelves a lot...

Mind you that paint can also separate so if it seems thin from the get go stir it a bit.

[IBBoard]

Thinning is all about consistency and surface tension. If it shrinks rather than staying as a big blob then it is probably either thin enough or possibly too thin. As we mentioned before, I think yellow is particularly bad for being too thin to cover correctly in some cases, so they will vary (and you might get variation from batch to batch as well).

I think the old paint was more prone to separating than the new stuff, and the screw-top dumpy pots (which they finally replaced) were more prone to drying out because of the way that the paint got clogged in the lid. I generally gave all of my pots a shake before using them - partly to mix it up if it thinned and partly to try to get some paint in the lid