Spring Cleaning - with an AT-AT!

Since Sunday evening I’ve finally been sitting at the hobby table and painting my Rebel Troopers for the third block. Today, however, there are no WIP pictures, but something different.

You often see painters in our hobby – even many high-end painters – sitting in front of large shelves with dozens, sometimes it seems hundreds of pots of paint in all shades and nuances. And that’s okay. Here is the colour range – and I don’t mean the manufacturer, but the actual colours – that I have been using exclusively for many years:

Eight colors and a wash. From these I always mix exactly the shades I need at the moment. Green is in there because it’s more difficult to mix a nice dark green, and the lighter medium brown is in there for the same as well.

I often feel that many hobbyists are put off mixing colors themselves – and the learning curve is indeed steep to begin with – or simply enjoy the convenience of the huge range of color tones on offer for our hobby a bit too much. I have been mixing my colors for over 30 years now. I started when I was a young teenager because there weren’t that many good acrylic paints for our hobby and I preferred to spend my pocket money on minis instead of dozens of colors. For years now, I don’t have to think about which of my colours I have to mix together in which ratio to get a specific tone – it’s like playing an instrument regularly for decades.

It has some great advantages in my opinion, which I can only recommend to any hobbyist: You pay less money for paints because there is no more paint that sits mostly unused on the shelf and maybe even dries out. You are no longer dependent on specific colour ranges and annoyed when a color that is important for your army is no longer available in the middle of a project, and in the end you have acquired a skill that opens up a whole new understanding of colours and their nuances.