Vallejo Paints for metal

[Lance]

I see in your literature that the Vallejo Vinyl Acrylic paints are especially formulated for plastic figures. Do they work equally as well on metal - or would I be better off sticking with my Testor's and Humbrol Alkyd paints for my metal cast figures?

Thankyou

Lance

[TomSauer]

... I use Vallejo (and GW) for homecast metal figures and it works quite well, at least not worse than the Humbrol etc. Of course, priming is necessary (an airbrush pistol is very useful here), but then it works well. And acrylic paints save you the awful smell of terpentine ...

[luftys]

I use an acrylic base car spray primer,but because it is coarse I warm it up first(like a baby bottle)not hot but warm which helps it flow better

[crazyhorse]

Is primer absolutely necessary?

[aelfwine]

Oh yes. Always prime. The paint sticks better to primer.

PA's Mithril range are generally primed, and that's a nice paint to paint on. I use Games Workshop spray paint primer, because its convienient. Spray on, wait, start painting. Using black is good, because it means all the creases and folds in the figure are shadowed, and its easier to get a "3d" effect.

Others swear by white, but i find you need to make sure you cover all the white undercoat (not really neccesary with black), or you'll have this sort of dirty chalky look.

Gavin

[crazyhorse]

Cheers for that.

I went for grey in the end... ;D

[General Davout]

I tend to use spray on grey as the base coat with a watered down black as an ink that tends to lodge in the folds and creases to give the 3-d effect.

[aelfwine]

That works as well. I note that PA (or Mithril at least) sells a Vallejo spray on grey, but no black.

I will experiment with black ink on grey soon, though.

Gavin

[General Davout]

In the PA shop, you can see where many of the figures are sprayed with a base coat of grey.