Andrea paints and figures?

The Andrea acrylic paint is manufactured by Vallejo, same bottle with a different label. IMHO they are the best available acryilics for brush painting. Very opaque, level out nicely when dry & can be thinned & cleaned up with water. I think you'll like them.

The paints are superb. Unlike Tam. Paint. when brushing, if you overlay your brush, it won't pull up the layer you just put down. The finish is dead flat and smooth as you could want, at least for 54mm figures. The Vallejo site wil give you an excellent tutorial on shading and highlighting with these paints. Go here http://www.acrylicosvallejo.com/ and choose English then choose "Model Color" from the drop down menu. Scrol down until you come to PAINTING FIGURES WITH MODEL COLOR

Andrea figures sometimes need a bit of filling work and the box art is not always indicative of the quality of the casting. But, all in all, they are excellent figures and I've never been unhappy with any of the many I've done.

Do you know where you can purchase these acrylics on the net?

squadron, michigan toy soldier, redlancer sell the andrea paints
mts and red lancer sell vallejo

Mike

I find that the Vallejo are excellent for fiqure work, they don't have any of the hand brushing problems that exsist with Tamiya acrylic. Also like the large range of colours available.

I hope thats true, cause I have alot of figures I would like to do and my efforts so far have (IMHO anyway) been awful:-) I know practice makes perfect but practicing with the wrong type of paint makes it hard.

miller,

The best method for this type of painting with acrylics is the layering method. Building up the color like a topographic map. Start with the darkest highlight color first and work up to increasingly thinner bands of the lightest highlight color. Same with the shadws. Start with the lightest shadow color first and then work down to the darkest color. Because the dillution ratios seems so high, you'll be tempted to heavy them up. Don't. They may seem too thin and that your not laying down enough color as you build up highlights and shadows but the color is accumulative and shows up as it dries. You'll see it when you lay down a layer, wait a couple of minutes for it to surface dry and then hit it again. The build up of color will become evident. The other thing that I reccomend is that once you lay down your colors and drop in your highlights, then your shadows (easier to paint over light than it is to paint over dark) use a mid tone wash to even out the gradiation a little. This should be done once the colors have dried and do not over work it. One pass is sufficient and a light one at that.
Good luck and let us know how the progress goes.
Mike

an example. In progress piece.


another example of an in progress piece but done with vallejos

Thanks so much for the info renarts and the great pics, thats what I one day hope to have my figures look like