Hey all. I’m using some Tamiya XF Acrylic paint to brush on to cover some small details. I mixed two colors to get the shade I needed. It was mixed in a small paint cup. I started to use it with a very small brush and I noticed after about a minute the paint started to skin over. Over the course of about 30 mins, I had to stir the paint MANY times every minute or two to keep it from thickening and skinning over. Is this a normal trait of this paint? Again it was Tamiya Acrylic. Thanks.
It’s simply the solvent evaporating like it’s supposed to. That’s going to happen with pretty much any paint. Adding a little paint retarder to it will slow down the drying process. If you don’t have any retarder adding a little thinner with the brush periodically can extend the work time a bit.
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This is typical with all acrylic paints, but Tamiya is particularly bad about it since it’s alcohol based, and alcohol evaporates faster than water.
The first thing to recommend is that you use Tamiya’s X20A thinner to thin your paints, as it has a retarder in it that slows drying time. Secondly, try using a wet palette. That can add some moisture from underneath that will slow drying as well.
And lastly… I know other people have success doing it but I have really struggled to brush-paint Tamiya acrylics. They work awesome out of an airbrush, almost foolproof, so I thought I was just bad at brush painting altogether – until I tried some Vallejo and Citadel paints, which were made for brush painting and thin with water. They’re just a lot easier to work with.
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Ok great guys, no problem then. At least I know now.
Acrylic paints dry quickly. It took me years to figure this out. Get yourself a wet palette. OMG, it changed my life when brush painting. It will keep the paint wet and the skinning will stop. There are tons of videos on YouTube on how to use one. They’re not expensive, and are well worth it. There are also videos on how to make your own, so you can test out how they work.
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I also recommend using a wet palette, with water-based acrylics. I don’t recommend it with Tamiya’s X/XF acrylic line, which have an alcohol-based acrylic as their base.
As far as hand-brushing Tamiya acrylics goes, I use Tamiya’s X-20A to thin them. Once I realized that thinning a paint well is really necessary for hand-brushing, and once I started using Tamiya’s proprietary thinner, I got my best results. They work just like water-based acrylics, when I thin them.
I have 2 methods. One is to use a ceramic palette, put a couple of drops of the thinner in a well on the palette, then dip the brush in the paint, then in the thinner. Or I’ll use a jar of the thinner, dip the brush to pick up thinner, then pick up some color from the jar or the underside of the lid. When I apply the brush to the work, the paint thins and brushes on smoothly.
I use other brands, too, such as Vallejo Model Color, Andrea, Apple Barrel, Folk Art, all water-based.
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Maybe that’s why I’m still struggling with them! I’ll have to try a dry palette with my Tamiyas.
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Thanks for bringing this issue up because I’ve noticed the same thing when I’m brush painting with Tamiya’s acrylics. I’m going to try some of these solutions too.
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For those of you who don’t know. Both a wet palette and dry palette are available in the Trains.com store which we can earn gift cards to through this forum.
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Glad I wasn’t the only one experiencing this! I think this is the first time I helped someone on this site-although indirectly! Lol.
I got mine from RedGrass Games. This is their catalog page for their wet palettes:
I got the smaller palette, which today is their Painter Lite model (when I got it, it was just their wet palette). I wanted the smaller footprint on the bench. Their v2 palettes have a better seal than the original model, apparently.
Their real advantage is the quality of their palette paper. Its permeability is excellent, and you can clean the paper a couple of times before it becomes too worn to re-use.
The art supply company Masterson’s also makes a wet palette, and that was probably the most common product back in the day.
But you could even make your own, if you’ve a mind to. I made my own, when I first wanted to try out working with a wet palette, to get the hang of it, before I bought a commercial product. I just took an airtight takeout container, a kitchen sponge that fit, and I used brown packaging paper for the actual palette. It worked well enough, though packaging paper isn’t ideal; paper fibers would work their way out of the paper, and the container’s plastic didn’t hold up to the constant opening and closing. It eventually cracked
But it served its purpose. I got comfortable with using the palette, and then bought the RedGrass Games model.
Could I have just bought a commercially available product first? Sure. I just felt like trying the process out first.