DSPIAE "Color Test Card"

[TheKinksFan]

As it's not legal to buy disposable plastic spoons in the EU, or order them from abroad, I ordered two sets of these from Aliexpress: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005003737747272.html?spm=a2g0o.order_list.order_list_main.5.21ef1802SpAoAd

 

Although they are more expensive than spoons, it's nice that it's a compact deck so storing the swatches is easy, and also finding any particular swatch, as they're divided in sections by the main colours. And the background is in white, grey and black, to mimic the three most common primer colours. So all in all, looks to be quite nice and practical product.

[CrowTRobot]

Interesting. How many cards come in each set? I've painted lots of plastic spoons, but they're difficult to organize and the handles take up valuable space.

[TheKinksFan]

46 minutes ago, CrowTRobot said:

How many cards come in each set?

Not so many, 70 cards in one set. That's why I ordered two, I made two separate orders from that official DSPIAE store, because for some reason the shipping would have been more expensive if ordered in the same order. 

[CrowTRobot]

What are the cards made of? I can't tell if they're plastic or paper.

[Mike]

Are my plastic spoons now contraband? IIRC you can still buy those little vacformed "car" shaped oddities to test your paint on, so it's a shame I won't be able to get more spoons once my current batch has run out.  I'd guess there's little difference between the spoons and the bodyshells in terms of plastic and pollution. Maybe someone needs to do a re-brand on plastic spoons as "model paint tester sticks"?

[Enzo the Magnificent]

I use print-your-own business cards.  They come on an A4 sheet so that the colour details can be printed easily.  Then you simply spray the other side and keep them in a business card folder. 

[Mike]

7 minutes ago, Enzo the Magnificent said:

I use print-your-own business cards.

I have some plastic credit card blank stampings form a dodgy former squaddie that happens to Moderate on here, and while those can be good for coverage tests, sometimes you want to see a 3D rendition to get the feeling for the sheen and lustre (or otherwise) of a paint, especially if you're going to throw it at a shapely body such as a car.  I must have a look to see how much those spray test blanks cost.  If they're cheap, they might be useful for reviewing new paint ranges etc.

 

EDIT: Not cheap.  About £2 a throw, which is far too much for a semi-disposable piece.

[TheKinksFan]

32 minutes ago, Mike said:

Are my plastic spoons now contraband? IIRC you can still buy those little vacformed "car" shaped oddities to test your paint on, so it's a shame I won't be able to get more spoons once my current batch has run out.  I'd guess there's little difference between the spoons and the bodyshells in terms of plastic and pollution. Maybe someone needs to do a re-brand on plastic spoons as "model paint tester sticks"?

I'm not sure if this applies only to the European Union, if disposable spoons still available in the UK it means that selling them is still legal. Here there are no plastic straws either, not sold or in fast food restaurants.

[TheKinksFan]

58 minutes ago, CrowTRobot said:

What are the cards made of? I can't tell if they're plastic or paper.

I'm not sure either, I think they are  cardboard, but coated with something.

[Mike]

52 minutes ago, TheKinksFan said:

I think they are  cardboard, but coated with something.

Which probably makes them unrecyclable.

 

Not rolling my eyes at you, just the logic by which things come about.

[Casey]

2 hours ago, Mike said:

Not rolling my eyes at you, just the logic by which things come about.

They should be coated with plastic just like the test cards I am using.

 

And I would say it is worse, colorful paper cards can imply to someone they can be burned or turned into paper food containers. Which, with some paints I use,  is not the best idea.

 

I think all you need is to replace logical thinking with magical thinking and the world becomes easier place to digest

 

I will get some of those cards anyway and measure how neutral is the substrate on them, because if you put relatively thin paint on chemically brightened surface you can kiss your color matching goodbye.

 

There is a reason why the drawdown cards of good quality are tiny bit expensive.

Edited February 6, 2024 by Casey

[-Ian-]

I save all the sections of card from Eduard mask and PE sets and use the glossy side of those for paint tests, after spraying with a coat of primer. 

[-Ian-]

19 hours ago, Mike said:

Which probably makes them unrecyclable.

 

Depending what the glossy coating is made from they may be biodegradable though, plastic spoons definitely aren't

[Mike]

8 minutes ago, -Ian- said:

Depending what the glossy coating is made from they may be biodegradable though, plastic spoons definitely aren't

Could plastic spoons also have been made from recyclable plastic?  My understanding of which plastics are and aren't recyclable are fuzzy, as a lot of what's deemed recyclable is coloured by what we can put in our bins.  We're told not to recyclable the likes of plastic bags and packaging, but we can take them to the nearest super market.  Off-topic, but we also used to be able to put a lot more metals and devices in our bin than we can now.  I suspect that's down to what they have contracts for.

[-Ian-]

3 minutes ago, Mike said:

Could plastic spoons also have been made from recyclable plastic?  My understanding of which plastics are and aren't recyclable are fuzzy, as a lot of what's deemed recyclable is coloured by what we can put in our bins.  We're told not to recyclable the likes of plastic bags and packaging, but we can take them to the nearest super market.  Off-topic, but we also used to be able to put a lot more metals and devices in our bin than we can now.  I suspect that's down to what they have contracts for.

I'd have thought it would be possible to make them from recyclable plastic but I'm pretty sure the ones sold generally aren't, presumably for cost reasons but I'm not an expert on the subject.

 

The rules around what you can recycle vary from one area to the next which doesn't help with the confusion. I moved house twice in the space of 9 months in 2017/18 living in 3 different council areas, each council had different rules around what exactly could and couldn't be recycled.

[Mike]

2 minutes ago, -Ian- said:

I'd have thought it would be possible to make them from recyclable plastic but I'm pretty sure the ones sold generally aren't, presumably for cost reasons but I'm not an expert on the subject.

 

The rules around what you can recycle vary from one area to the next which doesn't help with the confusion. I moved house twice in the space of 9 months in 2017/18 living in 3 different council areas, each council had different rules around what exactly could and couldn't be recycled.

Cost seems to be the factor with everything It's "good" that it's not just me that finds the confusion irritating, when I'm told to chuck things in the grey bin that I know are recyclable.  I know that recycling is more keyed to co-mingled waste these days, which makes me wonder why we still have so many bins, as us humans are insanely unpredictable.  I'm forever delving into my bins to retrieve something I've accidentally put in there.  Anyway, we're getting woefully off-track now, so I'll shut up

[sinnerboy]

You can still get plastic spoons from Amazon

[Mike]

5 minutes ago, sinnerboy said:

You can still get plastic spoons from Amazon

<PANIC BUYING BEGINS>

[psdavidson]

1 hour ago, sinnerboy said:

You can still get plastic spoons from Amazon

Most of them are classed as "reusable", which may be a get-out on the disposable ban

[Mike]

3 minutes ago, psdavidson said:

Most of them are classed as "reusable", which may be a get-out on the disposable ban

I thought someone was gonna break down my door and arrest me for unlawful spoon ownership, and brandishing a disposable spoon in a public area.

[Casey]

2 hours ago, Mike said:

unlawful spoon ownership,

Now I have this creepy image of someone ringing to my door to enquire me about my spoons...

Edited February 7, 2024 by Casey

[Casey]

I've got couple of those and tested them out.

 

Here are my observations:

Cards are tiny, they are of size of a play cards (8.5/6cm), and that means only half of the area is useable for testing. They are definitely aimed for brush/airbrush color cards making. They have a tiny hole in one of the corners where one can put an (included) metal ring to make a pretty decent color fan. They are clear coated, and feel exactly like playing cards. In the box, there was 70 cards (I've got Black/Grey/White ones), 6 separator cards and one useless card that is just a box art repeated.

 

The separator cards are awesome feature, they have small tabs and let you build a fan in which you can easily navigate, like using tab for either different color schemes or types of paint (flat/glossy/metal).

 

The useless card could have better use if it was blank or designed to write on and describe what is in your fan...

 

I've measured the substrate, it came out as (all colors in L*a*b* values using D65/2 geometry, and D/8 SCI spectrophotometer)

White: 97.87, 0.74, 0.03

Grey: 66.03, -0.68, 4.00

Black: 26.41, 0.32, -0.06

 

Rendition of those using sRGB conversion

 

I have an issue with the colors of the card themselves.

White: Under spectrophotometer you can see that there is a dip around 560-570nm wavelength:

 

Grey: The 570nm dip is even more noticeable:

 

The purpose of substrate on a test card is form a layer over which a non-fully opaque paint will stay on and reflect all the light that comes through the paint back into it. Ideally it should be a straight line across all spectral frequences. That means the colors on those cards on white and grey area that are not 100% opaque will have less green/yellow than they really have. It is extra unfortunate that this is inside of human best color sensitivity range, and the difference could be similar than is between a poor RAF Dark Green and perfect RAF Dark Green.

 

The black is great, I have no objections to it. It's almost straight 5% LRV line across visible wavelengths.

 

With current price, the cost of a single card came down to ~0.17$ per card.

 

What I like: The 'make your own color fan' feature. Black is good.

What I did not like: Size of the card and its layout makes it impossible to use as a real drawdown card. The white could be better, the grey is really not good. Price - they are not much cheaper than normal cards. Lenetea's are around 17 cents a piece themselves but postage cost which rises price up - you have to buy at least 500 cards box (heavy). Additionally, the  DSPIAE 'writable' part of the card is also clear coated. That makes writing on them in a way that you would like to stay written a bit tricky.

 

 

 

 

 

Edited March 5, 2024 by Casey
English. Where art thou?

[Casey]

To add to the topic, if you ever want an alternative, I used (and still like to use) something like that:

 

 

Or a refill for those:

 

 

 

They cost around 14$ for box or 10 for refill. There is 1000 stickers in a roll.

 

I usually just cut 2 from a roll and gluetack them to a surface, then spray while they are on the backing paper. Once they are dry enough, just peel them and apply to some reference charts. In time I've built quite a few of them that way, here is a photo of one:

 

(this is a first page of my Army Painter colors handy reference)

 

The downsides are: it is not a plastic coated substrate (this can be a good side since even the most stubborn acrylic sticks to it like a glue), you need to put some extra effort to organize them, and it is more for acrylics than anything else, since you wont be able to peel them off that easy if you spray them with hard lacquer. Tamiya acrylics work fine.

 

A hint, if you attach them for spraying onto a black/white checkerboard background you can guesstimate if you achieved desired opacity by checking the background overspraying.

 

The spectra of those Chromalabel circles (red line below) is better neutral white than the DSPIAE (blue line). This is, in fact, almost 3.0DE difference.