The SECRET to Thinning Paints perfectly EVERY TIME!

If you're looking for a way to thin your paints perfect every single time for things such as base coating or techniques such as glazing, well, stick around because you're in the right place. [music] Hello and welcome back to the channel. My name is Norm.

You're watching the Painters Portal and I'm back today with another how-to video. And in today's video, we're going to be looking at how to thin your paints. Now, thinning your paints is important for most aspects of miniature painting.

Whether that be trying to get a really smooth base coat when you're initially painting the model, or whether you're trying to do certain techniques such as glazing, these things all require thinning of paint to different consistencies. And it can be quite daunting when you first start to paint miniatures on what exactly you should be thinning them to. Well, I'm going to show you two methods today.

one for base coating your miniatures, what the paint consistency should look like and how you can achieve that. And then once you've learned how to do this, you're going to put that into practice and we're going to use a similar kind of method on glazing. Again, I'm going to show you the kind of consistency that you need to get to for different glazes, how they're going to react, and also a couple of tips to make sure that you're executing everything perfectly.

Before we jump straight in, you are going to need a few things if you're wanting to follow along with this tutorial. Obviously, you're going to need some paint, some brushes, but you are also going to need some gloves. Now, if you don't have any gloves already, painting with gloves is good practice when you're painting miniatures because it stops any contaminants, oils, things like that.

Getting from your hands onto the miniature. But in this case, we're going to be using the gloves to test the paint on to see what the consistency is like before we apply it to the miniature itself. You're also going to need a wet palette.

And it's worth noting that I don't use the wet pallet paper that typically comes with wet pallets. I use a parchment paper. And it's the same one that Infernal Brush uses.

The reason that I use this is because when I was watching his videos, I noticed that my paint wasn't behaving the same as his on the wet palette. I reached out to him, asked him why, and he said it's based on the paper that he uses. So, I started using this and I actually much preferred how the paint was behaving on the parchment paper as opposed to the pallet paper that comes with the wet pallets.

So, if you do want to get any of that, it is some Reald's genuine nonstick parchment paper. I would recommend this one. You can get a few others and I know that some people have issues with others whereas in that's a tried and tested.

So that's what you're going to need before we jump in. First up, I just want to show you a visual of what it looks like when your paint is too thick or too thin. Because this is a mistake that a lot of beginners make, myself included when I first started painting.

you either take paint straight out of the pot and when you paint it on you have a lot of issues or when it comes to thinning paints you thin it way too much and it starts to act like a wash. So I'm just going to show you two examples. One that's too thick, one that's too thin.

And we'll just go through how the paint behaves and then moving on from that, we're going to look at how to perfectly thin the paint to give ourselves a nice smooth base coat. So, first of all, I'm going to start by showing you what paint that is too thick looks like. And this is corn red straight out of the pot.

It's a popular red. It's one that I like using. And when I'm painting this, I'm going to try and be as realistic as I can.

And what I mean by that is I'm not going to purposefully try and paint this super thick. I am going to try and spread the paint out and get a an even coat or as even as we possibly can. But you can already see with the wet paint that the finish on this is not going to be very nice.

And the reason behind that is that thick paint acts very differently to thin paint because it doesn't flow. So you have to push the paint around to where you want it. And what happens when you do that is it collects in recesses or it ends up obscuring details on the miniature.

and where you pass the brush through that paint, you end up with really thin spots that don't give yourself nice coverage. And you're going to see this when this paint dries and we take a look at the overview. So, as you can see now that the paint has dried, we've got obvious brush strokes around the model and the paint has collected in some of the details.

And although it's collected in certain parts of that detail, there are also little parts of it that don't have any coverage. and that's caused the paint hasn't flowed correctly. You can also see where I've been pulling the brush strokes down to the bottom that there are those obvious brush strokes where the paint has thinned in areas as I mentioned earlier.

And then at the bottom of this miniature, you can see where the paint collects as the brush stroke has ended. And that's what obscures all the detail and leaves you with a really poor finish. Next up, I just want to show you what it's like to paint with paint that is far too thin.

Now, this paint is probably glaze consistency. So, although you're going to use this type of paint for certain techniques, base coating definitely isn't one of them. It's going to act the total opposite to thick paint.

And what I mean by that is where we were struggling to get the paint into the recesses or around the details when it was too thick. Well, this is going to flow straight into them. It's going to act like a wash.

So, you're going to notice that a lot of the pigment collects around the details such as the rivets or in the panel lines, [music] but then on the panels themselves, the paint's going to stay transparent. You'll see that also with thin paint, it takes an awful lot of passes to get anything close to an opaque layer, and it's just not what we want to do. You can achieve a nice opaque layer by finding a perfect middle ground between the two.

And trying to do it this way would just be wasting so much more time. Again, now that this panel's dried, you can see what I mean by the paint acting like a wash. So, a lot of the pigment has flowed into the recesses and the panels themselves were left with this quite transparent paint.

Whereas in the panel lines and the edges of the panel or around the rivets themselves have got large collections of pigment and that's quite opaque. The overall finish of this just isn't very uniformed and it's not what we want for a nice base coat. Okay, so we've looked at two examples there of what's wrong.

Paint being too thick, paint being too thin. So let's show you how to get it just right. And we're going to start off by taking a look at what your paint should look like on the palette.

First up, you're going to want to take the paint from your port or from your dropper bottle and apply it in a blob on your wet palette. And we're going to treat this as a reservoir. It's important not to spread this too much around your wet palette.

And we just pull from that reservoir. And this way we ensure that that paint stays nice and wet and the work time is much longer on that blob of paint. When we start to thin our paint, what you're going to want to do is take the tip of your brush and dip it in some water.

Whether that's from your water pot or I like to use the edge of the wet palette. And what we're going to want to do is start to pull paint from that reservoir. And we're looking for how the paint behaves on the wet palette.

So, while I talk to you about the behavior of the paint, I'm just going to play around with the paint on this palette just to try and give you some sort of visual reference. Because what I'm looking for is the paint to have a little bit of spring in it. And what I mean by that is when you pull the paint from its original pool, you want it to retract back into its original shape or towards its original shape.

And if you can get to this consistency, you know that you're eventually going to be able to produce a nice even base coat with two or three passes. If you've got brush strokes on your wet palette, you know that your paint's too thick. And if your paint is retracting back into the original pool too quickly, you know that the paint is too thin.

So, just play around with the paint. Add a little bit more water if you need to, and just pull from that reservoir of paint until you're happy with how the paint's flowing on the palette. And once you learn this consistency, it's very similar for most paints that you're going to use on this palette.

and you're going to be able to nail a nice smooth base coat every single time. So, it's quite hard to show you paint that's too thick on a wet palette when we start adding water to it, but I just want to show you what the paint would look like if you thinned it too much to sort of a glaze consistency. So, I'm going to add a dramatic amount of water to this undiluted blob.

And you're going to see that the paint moves much quicker around the palette. it retracts back into that original pool much quicker than what the correct consistency did and it loads itself much easier into the brush. Now, this would be a glaze consistency, but it's definitely not what we're looking for for a nice base coat.

Another great way to test the consistency of the paint is on the back of your hand. So here where I'm using the thick paint, you'll see like in the first example, we're getting quite thick areas of paint and then once this dries, we're left with quite transparent paint where the brush strokes have been. Opposite to this is the thin paint where the pigment moves around far too easily in the thin paint following the brush strokes and ends up pooling massively in one area.

Now, I'm going to use what I'm classing as the right consistency of paint. And it's worth keeping in mind that when you paint this on your miniature, you're not going to get a perfect coat first time. You're probably going to need two or three thin coats.

So, by testing the paint on the back of your hand, you're going to see how many passes it takes in order to get a nice opaque layer. And typically, that's how many passes you're going to then need to use on your miniature. So, I'm going to do the first pass, which is probably not going to give us amazing coverage, but by the time we do the second or third pass if it's needed, it should be nice and opaque.

So, after the second pass of the brush, you can see that the coverage is much better than the thick example and the thin example. But, we've still got a little bit of that black glove showing from underneath. So, I think I'm going to do a third pass just to give myself an opaque layer.

And if that dries and we're happy with it, that's what we're going to go with. So, you can see after the third pass of paint, we're left with a nice smooth opaque layer. And I'm happy with that.

That's what I'm going to use on the miniature. And let's see what it turns out like. So, now that we've done the glove test, we know that we're going to need three layers of paint in order to get a nice opaque finish on this panel.

So, we're going to start off with layer one. Um, the coverage on this is going to be pretty poor. The reason being is because it's thin paint, it's still going to flow into the recesses and the initial pigment is going to collect around the detail, but the flat areas of the panel are probably going to stay quite transparent once it's dried.

But layer two and layer three are going to deal with that. So, as you can see now that it's dried, exactly what I was talking about has happened. the pigment has flowed into the recesses and some of those areas are getting nice coverage, but there are parts of the flat panel that still need a hell of a lot more work.

So, now that we're starting the second layer, you can immediately see that the coverage of the paint is much better than it was the first time round. [music] It's not going to be perfect. There are still going to be parts of the flat panels that that dark undercoat is still going to be showing through a little bit.

But if we just do a full second pass, you just have to trust that the third pass is going to fix all of those issues and we're going to be left with a nice opaque clear. And now we're on to the final layer of paint. And I just want to say that it's important to make sure that the previous layer of paint has fully dried before you start applying the second or the third.

I know it can be quite easy to think, I'm just going to start painting the next layer, but if you don't let the paint fully dry before you start the next layer, you can often cause tears in that paint and that's going to give us unwanted texture. So, just make sure that when you are painting, and this applies to any technique, not just with base coating, make sure that your paint is dry before you apply another layer. So, now that that third layer is dry, you really can see just what a difference a good base coat can make.

You've got the thick paint on the left where you can see the obvious brush strokes and some of the paint ruining some of the details. And then on the right you've got the thin paint which has acted like a wash but the central base coat which was with paint that has been thinned correctly. You just get a nice thin opaque layer which does the best of both worlds.

It's thin enough that it doesn't obscure any of those details but it's thick enough that you get good coverage and a really smooth finish on your miniatures. Okay. So now you've learned how to thin your paints or you've learned one method of thinning your paints.

You can apply that to other painting techniques. When I first learned how to thin my paints, I then wanted to know how to correctly thin your paints for glazing. And it's not really any different.

You can just take what you've learned and apply it to other painting techniques. Glazing is essentially just thinning your paints extra thin to achieve a seamless transition between two colors or for non-metallic metallic effects, you're going to be using a lot of glazing. And I'm going to quickly show how to apply what you've just learned into a technique such as glazing so that when you're wanting to do different techniques, you can tailor it to your needs.

So, first of all, I just want to show you the consistencies of paint on the palette. At the top, we've got base coat consistency, which we're not going to mix any further. In the middle, we've got paint that we're going to mix with water, one part paint to two parts water.

And then at the bottom, we've got paint that we're going to mix one part paint to four parts water. And before we jump in, I just want to talk about loading a brush correctly. Because when you are dealing with super thin paint, if you overload a brush, it's going to cause you a world of problems.

Now you can see in this example that I have loaded the brush way too full. The belly is full of this glaze consistency paint and it's blowing the shape of the brush out. So when we come to use this on the back of the hand, the paint free flows and you have no control over it whatsoever.

So when you're starting to glaze, you only need a small amount of paint on your paintbrush. And it's super important that once you've loaded the brush up, you [music] then wick that brush onto some paper towel so that the excess paint is removed. By doing this, you can see that when we return to the back of the glove and just use the tip of the brush, we have much more control of the paint that is on the brush simply because of the fact that it's not overloaded.

So, we're going to put into practice what we previous learned, and that's a test on the back of the hand. Starting with paint that is too thick. And this time we're going to start with base coat consistency.

And although it is slightly transparent, you would really struggle to get a seamless transition with paint that is this thick. When we move on to the paint that has been thinned 2:1, you can see that this paint is much thinner than the base coat consistency. And if we were to treat this like our miniature and try to paint on a second layer, we would be able to see what a transition would be like.

And when this paint dries, you can see that there is an obvious line between the two layers. And that means in order to get a smooth transition, we would probably have to work over this point with a thinner glaze. And that's not ideal.

So, in order to get a much smoother transition, we're going to be going with the paint that I thinned roughly four to one. And when we first apply this onto the back of the glove, you're going to notice that hardly any pigment is there at all. Only at the very bottom of the brush stroke where the brush leaves the surface.

And that's typically what's going to happen with every pass of the brush. As the paint dries, you can start to apply more layers and treat this like your miniature, as though you were painting something and trying to create a transition from almost no color right down into some obvious green towards the bottom of the brush stroke. And you can see as we're building up this layer, this is exactly what's happening.

There isn't any obvious lines appearing as we move towards the bottom of the brush stroke. And if we applied this to his miniature or we were trying to blend in two colors, it would take more time. But this consistency of paint is going to give us a much nicer finish and a smoother transition between the two colors or from light to dark.

Again, we are working with really thin layers of paint here and they do dry incredibly quick. But it's really important that you let each layer fully dry before applying the next. And now we can see that we're happy with that consistency.

Let's get it on a miniature and see what it looks like. So I'm going to put this into practice on a power sword. It's been base coated in moot green and I'm using warpstone glow to try and create a darker transition towards the end of the blade.

When I'm working with glazes, each pass of the brush I'm going to move around 1 millm closer to the end of the blade. And what's going to happen is every time the brush loses contact with the surface of the miniature, that's where most of the pigment is going to be deposited. And as we slowly move towards the end of the blade, we should be able to create that transition from light to dark.

Now, this is something that I've managed to achieve from literally 2 minutes of glazing. I haven't spent hours on this, but you could really push the smoothness of this transition if you wanted to by using even thinner glazes and more of them. But you can see on this sword that there is an obvious transition from light to dark.

And I would say that's a success. And there you have it, another how-to video finished by myself. And I hope you find it helpful.

If you've been struggling with thinning your paints at all for any reason, I hope that you're able to take away something from this video that you've learned, apply it to your own miniature painting, and just get better from it. If there's anything in the video that didn't make sense to you, you want a bit more information or a bit more clarity on, make sure you drop a comment. I do try and reply to all the comments, so if I can help you further, I will try my best.

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