Hey guys, how can I darken and lighten my paint colors?? I want to do some post shading, should I just use white and black??
By how much should I add to darken and lighten??
Thanks, Anthony.
Anthony,
If you are going to do tyhat then you need to lighten and darkren your base coat color. Very thin black and whites would be okay for grey’s but for other colors you would need to lighten and darken your base color with blues, browns, yellows and a touch of white.
Use a color wheel. They are extremely useful in determining complimentry andsecondary color ranges.
Don’t quote me on this …but, try (on a practice model) shading/spraying your clear coat to lighten the paint(usually) between the panels on the top surfaces of an aircraft. If you have allready darkened the panel line the lightened clear coat(toothpick drop of flat white mixed with the clear coat) will lighten the pre painted base coat. In other words your replicating the sun and weather effects to a factory paint job by lightly using a whitened clear coat to change the opacity of the panel color. I think it works better than trying to tone down the color/shade of the base coat. HTH
Anthony,
I recently tried post shading for the first time and am pretty happy with the results.
I just painted my base colours and then lightened the same base colour with a few drops of white in my small colour cup. I did this till I had a shade I was happy with. I can’t tell you the exact ratio I just did it till it looked right.
I then painted in the centre of the panel, paying more attention to the upper surfaces of the aircraft. The beauty of this method is that I don’t think it really matters how much lighter you make the paint as if you just apply a little light coat each time you can build it up till you get the result you’re looking for.
Don’t forget you’ll have to weather your decals too as they’ll really look out of place being all shiny and new if the rest of the plane is all old and worn. I did this by holding my ab about 20 cm from the model and misting some white paint over the applied decals. I was pretty happy with how this turned out and next time I’ll try doing this to the decal sheet before I apply them as I think it’ll be a lot easier and I’ll be less woried about the overspray on my paint job.
Hope this helps.
Mark.
Obviously paints can be lightened or darkened prior to application. Post shading with pastels works too. The link below is to an article about sprayed on filters.
I find that lightening with an off-white (pale tan) and darkening with a black-brown (very dark) avoids getting unrealistic tints of your base color. Pure white and black shading agents don’t look right in most cases. You’re about to have a lot of fun and reach new levels of satisfaction in the hobby- good luck!