Working with Mediums

Enjoying beach life. The timeshare version of it.

Since the last post, I took a small vacation to Florida, where I got to spend lots of time on the beach making sandcastles for Kidzilla to stomp on, as well as add some red hues to my pasty hide. This was the first time I have been to the ocean since the summer of '92, on the shore of East Anglia in the UK. Unless the Chesapeake Bay in Baltimore counts, then Games Day '99. But those waters were kind of gray and merciless compared to what you see above!

It wasn't all good weather though, and rains allowed us to go and explore the city where we found a kick-ass museum.

"Hey there!"

 But choppy Florida waters are actually fun for some people:

NOT me!

 And hey, everyone has their hobbys, right?

Well, on one of our rainy-day jaunts around the city we stopped at the legendary Pearl Paints. Pearl Paints is an awesome store, and if you are an artist or hobbyist in anyway, I would encourage you to check them out while they are still open, as sadly, word on the street is that they will be closing their doors soon. Which is very sad to me, as I have a great memory from my 2nd year at the Joe Kubert School of all my roommates cramming ourselves into a car and making a trip across northern New Jersey to go visit a Pearl store in order to load up on art supplies for a painting class. I have never seen an art store this well stocked or this diverse with product an it has remained the benchmark that I hold all other art stores up against ever since.

This store in Fort Lauderdale is no exception either, and I was quite pleased to visit it and get some cool art supplies. Over in the clearance section, I was able to find some items that I wish to present to my usual readers as this stuff might be of interest to the model painter.

One of the paints I found was a Delta Ceramcoat Gleams acrylic paint called Metallic Red Copper which turned out to be an exact match for the result I get when I use red ink glaze on top of gold that mentioned on here before (Skippy the Bloodthirster's armor). I was quite pleased with that find and I have been using in on my Khorne Berserkers since I got back.

But the real find on this trip to Pearl Paints, and what will become the meat of this post, are the Acrylic Paint Mediums that I found buried in their clearance section.



For those of you unfamiliar with Acrylic Mediums, basically they are solutions that you mix into acrylic paint to achieve any number of specific effects that you can't normally do with just the paint. They are mostly used with 2-D art applications in mind, for example Glazing Medium, however the various companies out there foresaw that the users of their craft paint might be able to take advantage of these products as well. And, unless you're a Citadel Paint purist, you are probably aware that acrylic paint is acrylic paint. Sure, the brands are all different and one may function better than another in application or dry times, or you might prefer one for taste reasons (they have droppers, the wells are bigger, they fit in your hobby box better, etc.) but at the end of the day, they are all fairly the same. Something the reps from each company will all try to deny of course. 

Extender, Control, and Thickener Mediums.

When I saw the three Mediums above, and for incredibly low prices at that, I just had to get them. These will work with all acrylic paints, although I imagine some formulas might not work as well as others. The big experiment will be when I attempt to use this stuff with the current line of citadel paints, which are very funky acrylics indeed.   

The first one in the pic, if you read left to right, is the Extender Medium. This stuff is straight-forward in intent and application: You mix it into the paint you're using to literally extend the drying time to the paint you're using. I would only use this if painting something large and or if I have made a unique color that I don't want to have dry up on me before I've finished using it. 

A lot of my paint schemes involve the thinning of the paint with water to create a faux-glaze effect that helps convey a transition between two colors to give the viewer the illusion of fading. There are examples of this in my Space Wolf Gallery (on the tab-bar above). Control Medium will allow me to do something similar without losing pigment on the top color, but still providing transparency to the color beneath it. It's really great if you intend to do a lot of color blending. I plan on doing a lot of experimenting with this one, especially when I start working on my Slanneshi and Tzeentchian forces. Also, if you are working with an acrylic paint that wants to be difficult (clumping) this stuff should help eliminate that. 

Thickener Medium is like Viagra for paint. -Nah, not really! It's a lot like Control Medium actually, but it doesn't thin the paint quite as much but keeps it 'thick' while creating a transparency effect.

At some point, I will do a bit of experimenting with this stuff and post the results here. These experiments will be in both 2-D painting and of course my mini/model painting. In particular I want to see how this stuff will work with the current Citadel line (I have no doubt it will work well on their older '90's line) and on metallics.

And since I've shamelessly plugged Pearl Paints on this post today, why not check them out online and see if you can find something cool. Who knows, you just might! www.pearlpaint.com