Home made model paint colour swatches

[beany]

If like me you have model paints numbering in the 100s rather than 10s then you may also find it is difficult to keep track of what you have and to compare them - e.g. who's RLM 71 looks best (to me that is) type of thing. Some time ago at work they started issuing us with business cards which were about as much use to me as a chocolate tea pot - but I immediately saw the potential in these pre-cut mini sheets of card. I simply have them to hand whenever I open a tin of paint these day - write the description underneath and keep them grouped by colour - greens, greys, browns etc, in an old Ferrero Rocher box. Some need a couple of coats (as you will see in the picture), and some require duplicates or even triplicates - do olive drabs go best with the greens, browns, or grey - I just put one in each. Here is a (poor) photo of a few of the many greens that I have.

 

 

Cheers

Al.

[depressed lemur]

This is something I keep meaning to have a start at, but I find that there is so much variation in colour dependant whether the paint is applied by brush or air brush I keep putting it off.  I think this will need re-looking at again now.

[spitfire]

I tend to make up paint chips to decide which paints to use on specific builds, here's an example, I made up these when I was building French WW2 fighters.

 

Cheers

 

Dennis

[Flying Badger]

Hi

You may be able to help!

I have access to a colourimeter (device that measures absolute colour values)

I am trying to build up a collection of paint samples painted on white background (I use small precut pieces of plasticard) that I can run under the colourimeter and get exact values for - I find that the references on the web are all off by a bit as they use the manufacturers paint chart pdfs or similar and then use a programe like photoshop to get an RGB value from them - which results in lots of errors.

So would any of you be willing to let me borrow your paint charts to run under my colourimeter? I'd of course share the resulting data as well as that from my paints.

I could pay for postage and then post them back to you recorded so that they were safe, or if you are in the north of England (I'm in Bradford) I could arrange to pick them up and drop them off again.

I currently have about 190 different paints mostly all acrylic in the Revel, Tamiya ranges with a few humbrol and a few xtracrylic so anyone who uses other paints would be great.

My ultimate aim is to put them up online as a resource for modellers. I know there are other sites out there already but Scalemodeldb.com and IPMSStockholm all use manufacturers stated values and paint4models.com doesn't say where it gets it's colour values from and they vary with the same paint number!

Anyone willing to help out?

TFB

[pigsty]

Cunning. Does the solvent soaking into the card make any difference to the colour when it's dry?

[Flying Badger]

hmm not sure

I doubt the solvent soaks in that much as I've scraped painted card with a scalpel and been able to scrape through to the white card underneath.

I guess if the paint has had more than one coat it shouldn't be a problem as the first coat will seal the card and the second coat will be the right colour.

TFB

[Caerbannog]

I had basically the same idea some time ago and started with thick white paper and painted these with a brush. However I mostly ended up with rather streaky colour chips, so I changed to glossy paper cut to squares of about 4x4 cm and keep them close to my spray area, so I only forget every third colour or so. I write the information on the back side of these chips and put them into a ring binder with photo corners (sorry this is the one to one translation from German but I hope you get what I mean...): I can clip the DIY chips into these "corners" and remove them to easily compare them directly. It is very easy to work with the chips and the colour collection builds up alongside without extra trouble :-)

[Flying Badger]

Caerbannog

Yeap thats similar to how I do mine - I'm using 3 x 2.5cm pieces of plasticard but otherwise its the same, keep mine all pre-cut in a little container next to the spray booth.

I found the same as you, airbrushing gives a nice even colour without the streaking that I got from brushes and a couple of coats gives me a completely variation free colour.

I also find it's good airbrush practice when I get a new paint - occasionally a colour is that little bit more awkward and spraying the paint sample first means I find out before pointing my airbrush at a model.

TFB

[Caerbannog]

Good point Flying Badger. I have no standard sequence but spraying the colour chip first can certainly avoid some bad surprise - I will keep it in mind!