by Judith Northwood

Remember, your question can be answered here! Just post a response or send me an email with any of your painting quandaries or frustrations, and I’ll select from those for future columns. This week’s question is from comments made about my first column on selecting a brush.

Q: How can I get colors to work together well when layering to avoid a dull or chalky appearance?
A: Problems like those result from the way layering works, which ultimately stems from some differences between the physics of light and how pigments work in paint.

Let’s start with some basics. Layering (similar to washes or glazing in fine art flatwork) is a technique where thin, translucent layers of paint are applied to create a gradual transition from mid-tone to highlight and shadow colors. It’s an excellent way to avoid harsh delineations between shades of paint. This technique achieves its goal so well because some of the prior layer shows through. It comes with some complications, though, just like it has advantages.

The most important rule for effective layering is to look carefully at your colors and make sure there is minimal, or at least a compatible, difference in hue. Value, the range from dark to light, is typically what you want to change for basic shadowing and highlighting, but there can be problems if there is too much difference in hue between two colors layered immediately on top of one another, like a greenish-blue directly over a reddish-blue. If you can, find sets of colors with similar bias, often called undertone. A blue-bias red will often contrast sharply with a yellow-bias red, even to the point of clashing, no matter that they both fall within the general category of ‘red.’ When layering, remember that each layer should only be a little bit different from the one immediately below it. Too much difference and the delineation between the two layers will be more obvious than you might like.

A good way to avoid that is to mix colors between your extremes. Select your highlight, mid-tone and shadow, then mix shadow and mid-tone for an intermediate step between the two and mix highlight and mid-tone for an intermediate step between them. That layer of mixed paint will even out a lot of the difficulties in transitions. Some difference in hue, though, can be used to deliberate effect. Because cool colors appear to recede and warm colors appear to come forward (part of the effects of what artists call atmospheric perspective), having that blue-bias red as the highlight and a yellow-bias red as the shadow will typically look ‘off’ in comparison to a blue-bias red in the shadow and a yellow-bias red in the highlight.

I recall reading a mention of black primer in a comment to a prior column. Primer color is also important in the results you’ll have when layering. When light hits the painted surface of your mini, some bounces off the pigment particles in the paint on top, but some goes through and hits the layer(s) beneath. The lighter those layers, the more light will bounce back; vice versa, the darker the layers beneath, the less light will bounce back. As a result, layers applied over a dark color will always be less bright than layers applied over a light color. In addition, with the way that colors work together, black primer will make the layers applied over it appear cooler; whereas, white will make them appear warmer.

All of this is perceptible as long as there are few enough and thin enough layers over the primer for some amount of light to reach the primer through the paint. The more and the thicker the layers of paint, the more that the primer color’s impact will diminish. I’ve rarely seen situations, however, where the effect was completely eliminated without the paint being so thick that details in the miniature became obscured, so these effects are realities we ought to take into deliberate consideration when painting. Very few paints give such complete coverage that no light dispersion occurs through them, and this is how working with pigments and paint is different from color theory based on the physics of light. With paint, you’re not dealing with flat, uniform color; rather, you’re working with molecules of one or more pigments. On the microscopic level, paint coverage cannot help but be somewhat uneven, and the more the paint is thinned, the wider-spread the pigment particles end up being. Layering, then, is the technique most likely to allow primer color to have an impact on the finished appearance of the miniature.

In pointing out the difference between how primer colors behave with the paint applied over them, I definitely do not mean to imply that any shade of primer is necessarily better or worse than any other. They’re just different: different shades of primer will give different effects to the finished piece. If you want brighter, more luminous colors and a warm cast to the overall appearance, use white primer. If you want more subdued colors and a cooler cast to the overall appearance, then black primer is much better. You’re not completely locked into either, though. Even once you’ve applied a primer designed for metal or plastic, one that forms a strong bond with the surface of the miniature, you still have options to adjust how the paint colors will work.

Let’s say you want to paint a figure with dark clothing, but very pale skin: a vampire, perhaps. Primer with black, then start painting with one or two layers of white gesso just on the areas that will be skin. Gesso is better to use in this case than white paint because it has a very heavy pigment load and is designed to provide a good surface to hold later layers of paint. By the same token, you can primer in white, and apply black gesso just to those areas where you want more subdued color, or where you plan to put metallic paint. Any of the paints that use mica chips (interference, metallic, pearlescent, etc.) are more vivid when applied over a dark color than a light one, another situation where the amount of light that bounces off lower layers affects the appearance of higher layers of paint.

This general technique offers additional options. Gesso is made in more colors than just black and white, and vinyl-based acrylics, such as those designed for use on animation cells and some mural techniques (also Vallejo Model Color among the more widely available hobby brands), provide coverage nearly as well as gesso does. A warm brown would be a good choice to use if you wanted a strong but not brilliant red over a black-primer, since it would mute the intensity of both the dullness and the cool cast that the black tends to cause. Likewise, an earth yellow gesso or vinyl-based paint over the black primer will give the next layers of yellow paint an intermediate brilliance–less dull than yellow over black alone, but not as luminous as yellow over white.

In my own work, I use white or clear primer, since I like the effect of light reflecting back from the primer. Then I turn to gesso or vinyl-based paints for the initial mid-tone color when I want to have a final color fairly close to the paint chosen. Sometimes, though, I might opt for that first layer to be a color that I’ve chosen to modify the final effect, such as when I know I want a richer, darker, but still warm tone for a red cloak or tabard. In that situation I’ll often use burnt sienna beneath the first layer of red paint. If I want the mini’s red garment to be closer to burgundy, I might use a deep red-violet as my initial layer of paint. Later layers of more transparent paints then modify that, but never completely lose the effect the first color has.

Chalkiness, on the other hand, tends to result from the opposite side of the paint film. While dullness often relates to what colors were applied early on, chalkiness most often comes from the paint used on highlights applied late in the painting process. It’s a direct result of increasing the value of paint, making it lighter, through the addition of white pigment. White, like black, is low in chroma, also called saturation, both terms referring to the vividness of the color. So, when white is added to lighten paint, the intensity of the color is lost, and chalkiness results. The effect is most pronounced when an opaque white pigment (like titanium white) is added to an opaque colored pigment (like chromium oxide green). Translucent or transparent pigments blend better to avoid chalkiness, which is why many professional flatwork artists use zinc white instead of titanium white when mixing paint. However, most modern flatwork artists work a lot larger than we do on our little figs, so a certain amount of chalkiness doesn’t appear to be as overwhelming to the piece as a whole. The smaller the ‘canvas,’ the more any such effect is emphasized.

Unfortunately, I don’t know of any hobby paint lines that tell you what pigments are used in which paints (unlike fine art paint lines), and learning to mix your own paint requires both a learning curve and an investment in new brands of paint. It’s usually easier, all things considered, to use some tricks to minimize the impact of chalkiness.

First of all, look at the paint in the bottle. If it looks flat, pale or washed-out, it has a good chance of producing chalky results. Look for a highlighting shade that retains as much chroma as possible. Reds, greens and browns can be highlighted to yellow hues and purple to pink/magenta. Both yellow and magenta are typically from light-value, high-chroma pigments, so they work well for highlighting. Creating smooth transitions for the shift in hue can be achieved by intermediate mixing as described above. Skin tones tend to show the least evidence of chalkiness. Blue is a challenge, often easier to shadow deeper into indigo than lighten toward green. Keep in mind, though, that acrylic paints as a general rule dry darker than they appear in the bottle. Experimenting with your paint can help you choose the color you want something to be on the finished mini rather than how it appears through plastic when wet.

The best way I’ve found for avoiding chalkiness, however, goes back to mixing, but on a very limited scale. Pick up a few transparent paints in a range around the spectrum along with a brown or two, then mix a tiny amount of the transparent paint into the highlighting layers of a similar hue. This tends to mute the chalkiness, if not eliminate it completely. You can also do a light wash with the transparent paint as a final step, which reduces chalkiness and causes all the layers to blend into each other more evenly. There are a few hobby brands that make transparent paints, but many artists paints are made from transparent pigments (some brands say so on the bottle, or ask at your local art store for information on which pigments are transparent). Inks are usually transparent, but most are also very, very glossy. To use an ink for these techniques, mix it with some acrylic fluid matte medium before mixing it with paint or applying it as a wash. That will reduce the gloss and also make the ink easier to work with, even as a dilute wash, it will stay more where you put it than flooding out of control across the surface of the mini.

I’ve mentioned experimenting several times, so I should add one additional bit of advice: you don’t have to experiment directly on miniatures. Buy some inexpensive watercolor paper from an art or office supply store or website, cut it into small cards, then you can spray it with a light layer of primer. When it dries, you can try any technique, pattern or color combination that intrigues you without risking a prepped and ready mini.