Simple and silly paint questions

Reds (along with yellows) are notoriously a pain to paint. The undercoat (also white or yellow) helps the red "pop".

I haven't used them but I believe the "Candy" colours are transparent (ie they are not a "solid" opaque colour) and require a backing colour for the required effect. The metallic backing colour is intended to show through the transparent top coat. This gives an appearance of greater depth than a regular tinted metallic.

that is correct .

Ron

While I have used acrylics in my airbrush, I ordinarily do not like to.  The problem is, if I get distracted and do not clean the brush the minute I stop spraying, I get a clog.  I find dried acrylic much harder to clean than dried enamel when it inside airbrush.  So if you spray in airbrush with acrylic, cleaning brush well and immediately after spraying must take absolute priority over everything else.

Sometimes brushing with normal brushes can present a coverage problem.  A good primer helps with this.

All "candy" colors are translucent and require a metallic under coat to get the desired effect. Somewhere around 1964, I made the mistake of buying a can of candy color paint and spraying it directly on a model. Not a very effective paint job. Some of the Boyd colors from Modelmaster can get close to candy effects if airbrushed properly and carefully buffed out.

Candied colors in a can or bottle are formulated to float the transparent candy effect to the top while the metallic they contain are suppose to settle to the bottom layers. Unfortunately getting them mixed well enough and applied using the proper technique is the usual cause for them not working "as advertised". One of the best candied paint schemes I saw on a scale model car was done by first applying a silver metallic followed by several light layers of a thinned 9:1 red which was polished out after it had a couple days to cure. Then given several coats of a gloss clear...again rubbed out as needed between coats.

The coloration was deep and awesome.