Hello guys, Welcome back to Not Just Mecha, It’s Marco here and today we talk about
the Golden high flow line of acrylic paints.
During Christmas I added a new set of paints to my collection and after two months of experiments,
some of which you’ve already seen in the last few videos, I’m ready to share with
you my thoughts about how they fit our process and our very specific kind of paint jobs!
Miniature painting changed a lot in the last few years, thanks in particular to the realisation
that we can create real art in this bizarre little medium.
This idea changes everything because if your goal is to make art you start thinking like
an artist and you suddenly become open to fine art concepts, techniques and of course
materials.
Companies like Kimera and Scale75 immediately understood this paradigm shift creating new
amazing tools that really close the gap between hobby and artist paints but they are just
two products and it’s nothing compared to the variety you can find in fine art paints.
But before going on It’s really important for me to make this clear: you can fully live
this hobby at its highest with just ten colours and a single brush.
The point is not that you need this kind of stuff but that you have the choice to use
it, the choice to enter any art shop of the world and come out with something new, interesting
and sometimes mind blowing!
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Golden High Flow is a set of 49 acrylic colours, including Fluorescent and Iridescent paints
made with the same ingredients of other Golden Artist paint lines.
Here I have the whole range minus few tones that were out of stock in my local art shop
but I never buy the metallic tones.
In my experience metallic paints are the main and constant weak spot of any artist line
because their pigments have a size made to sell the shiny effect on the large scale of
a canvas, so they never work on miniatures looking more like fat glitters.
They come in dropper bottles with a super safe cap from which you can finely regulate
the flow of paint and they all have already an agitator ball inside.
The tubes have a different price depending mostly on the pigment they are made of and
on average they cost twice as much as a citadel pot, but you get a 30ml bottle so almost three
times the quantity of a GW colour.
The line is organised in two subcategories the opaque tones with the white cap and the
transparent colours with a translucent tip.
As we’ll see better later the difference between the two is subtle in a single application
but when you start building up layers the difference in opacity becomes much more evident.
As you can see here on the label they are made to be used with the brush, markers, dip
pens or the airbrush as they are, directly from the bottle, you don’t need to add or
do anything else to obtain the behaviour you see here.
This is real paint from the same batch that ends up in the bottle, so you know the basic
behaviour of every pot or tube when they are still in the shop’s rack.
You can even feel its texture and check the final finish.
I play a lot with these features in my paintjobs and being able to tell these properties before
leaving the shop has been a real gamechanger for me.
Then you have the name of the colour, its real technical, academic name so you can easily
match the hue with other lines or even other brands.
Miniature companies are extremely afraid of this possibility so they give you silly made-up
names to keep you bound to their brand.
And if you want to go deeper and be able to match even better your tones you can check
the code of the pigment used to make this colour.
This also gives you the information that only one pigment is used to make most of the basic
hues.
As you know from my mixing and sketching series this is super important when you use a colour
to create your own mixes because pure pigments give you stable results easy to recreate over
and over while mysterious combinations can lead only to mysterious and unpredictable
results.
If the tone is a mixture you can still check the pigments used here in the back and do
the chromatic math.
The little squares tell you a more precise indication of the general opacity or transparency
of the colour and this same system is used on any artist paint, even oil paints for example.
White square means transparent.
White with a line is semi-transparent.
Half white, half black is semi opaque, close to semi-transparency but more on the side
of opacity.
Full black means opaque!
This score here represents the lightfastness of the paint a property of a colour or pigment
that describes how resistant to fading it is when exposed to light.
This is an aspect of paint that’s totally alien to the miniature world but it’s extremely
important considering that we plan to have our models on the shelf for a very long time
not to mention display figures and dioramas.
You can also check the Golden website to find all these information in a single chart and
easily find what you need!
It is crazy how much stuff we decide to not be aware of in our hobby.
Compared to the load of information you get from these labels a classic pot of hobby paint
is basically a blind box.
The paint’s consistency is not a surprise.
It’s extremely fluid, almost like an ink, just a tiny bit less watery.
They have already inside additives such as flow improvers, film levelers and retarders
to create a very thin and free-flowing paint, able to set in a uniform, smooth coat.
This paint has a beautiful surface tension that makes it easy to load in the brush and
finely control the flow out of the tip: you can feel from the brush that it has been tested
for calligraphy.
In general, I find these colours a bit easier to handle compared to inks that often tend
to move and drip down with the simple pull of gravity and they produce more uniform layers.
Thanks to their high concentration of pigments the colours are incredibly saturated, vibrant
and brilliant reaching almost the saturation of opaque inks that are my gold standard for
these features and they maintain these properties even adding a ton of water or spreading them
in a super thin, transparent layer.
They are made with finely ground pigments, so the suspension is extremely stable, and
this helps reducing clogging issues in small tips and airbrush nozzles.
Here I’m using the 0.15 nozzle of my Infinity with paint straight form the bottle and everything
works super smoothly!
Reviewing the High flow line simply as airbrush paint, I put it in the perfect middle between
Molotow paints and Inks/Contrast paints.
Molotow are made for street art so crazily resistant, opaque and extremely mat and that’s
why I like to use them as coloured primers, while Inks are transparent and with a satin,
glossy finish, perfect to refine shadows, add saturation and create interesting effects
playing with the finish of different paints.
But these are two extremes difficult to connect and I really needed something ready to use
for all the applications in between!
But here’s the reason that really made me decide to make this video.
I bought these colours to save time when airbrushing and lazily fill a gap in the commission panting
speedy workflow but in these two months, I used them mostly with the brush.
I didn’t even plan to show them in video because I didn’t want to give you the idea
that you need something this technical and specific for airbrushing, but I soon discovered
that they work like a charm with my way of painting based on the two extremes of super
thick paint for sketches and super transparent paint for refining.
Because of their general transparency and fluid consistency they are obviously a long
way from being all-purpose paints, but they are crazily good for every technique that
involves transparency and fluidity: glazes, filters, washes, wet on wet techniques, grisaille
they all become faster and easier to do.
The same flow improvers, film levelers and retarders that make them great for airbrushing
make them easy to use with these techniques that need slow drying, watery transparent
layers still with a strong and uniform grab on a surface.
Just add water and you are good to go!
They dry a bit slower than standard acrylics and when mixed with other colours they can
influence their drying time, but when dry they have the classic strength and stability
of acrylics even if applied in thin layers and finish tends to be quite mat.
In conclusion if you like to paint with thick paint and layers the High Flow range is probably
a situational tool that remains confined in airbrushing applications and you can jump
directly to the amazing heavy body range but if your workflow is based on any kind of transparency
effect it can become an invaluable aid to get immediately the behaviour you want without
the need of adjusting the paint with mediums and other products.
Also here’s an idea: if you are in trouble understanding the dilution for airbrushing
or glazes for example grab a couple of bottles and use them as reference for you own mixes.
I suggest a light, opaque tone for tests with the airbrush and a dark, transparent hue for
glazing and filters so you have the two extremes that are usually the difficult part of each
approach!