Tamiya Acrylic Colors for Fallschirmjager Uniforms

chris hall wrote:

For flesh tones, you really need to use oil paints. Takes time and practice, but in my experience, acrylics don't even come close. You need to be able to blend tones together, and for this, oils win over acrylics every time.

From a former 32mm scale Games Workshop and Rackham figures painter who happily made shades and blending using Vallejo acrylics: Hrmpf.

There's an article in the first issue of Model Military International about painting a Fallschirmjager figure (a Verlinden bust, in this case) but using the three-color splinter camo pattern.

Concur that Tamiya paints are no good at all for brush-painting figures. Might be OK for airbrushing base colours, especially in 1/16 or larger (and in fact I did once use them to spray the base Field Blue uniform for the Tamiya 1/16 German Ace Fighter Pilot), but they dry far too quickly, even with flow enhancer added, to brush-paint. Far better to use Vallejo or, my preferred option, to mix appropriate colours from Citadel acrylics.

For flesh tones, you really need to use oil paints. Takes time and practice, but in my experience, acrylics don't even come close. You need to be able to blend tones together, and for this, oils win over acrylics every time.

Cheers,

Chris.

 

I'm also talking about mixing colors to achieve the right shades. When I  last used Tamiya paints on figures, some 10 or so years ago, I had been mixing their flesh with red brown to achieve a realistic flesh tone with the original formula. I got some of the new formula and the paint was drying on my palette and wouldn't respond to adding water except to loose any adhession.

You'll also find that if you lay down a brush stroke, it will skin over almost instantly. When you run your next brush load of paint, any contact will dissolve the skin and lift the underlying paint.

There was a time, from its introduction to the early 90's, when Tamiya paint was about as good as it got, brush OR airbrush. I knew guys who painted good looking cars by brush withthe old formula. I won a good number of awards with figures, autos, aircraft and armor with Tamiya painted models.

Unless you're willing to paint your figures one stroke at a time, with perhaps an hour or more of drying time between strokes, you should look into other brands. If you can't find them locally, there are numerous dealers on-line who carry Andrea/Vallejo.

I'm only painting 1/35 scale figures, and I'm not really worried about blending colors at such a small scale.  I'm just wondering which colors work the best for fallschirmjager camo and how the pattern is painted.

There really are no good Tamiya colors for figures since you need to use brushes as opposed to aiurbrushing. They dry too quickly ot blend colors and skin too fast to allow a new brushload of paint to touch the edge. If you're going to be doing figures, it would be in your interest to invest in Andrea and/or Vallejo paints that are formulated for painting figures. Vallejo has a huge palette of colors to choose from while Andrea is more limited. They are compatible wiuth each other and other acrylic paints. They have a very long shelf life, since the eye dropper bottles allow very little to no air to be captured inthe bottle. Sinmce they are designed to be thinned (with water ) the go a very long way. Tehy dry pretty much dead flat as well.