Hello,

I made german armor texture with cement + tamiya putty. So far so good, then I use dark brown vallejo primer. still good since the texture is on place, but when I did my first dark yellow coat, I had problem, When I am done all the texture were vanished.

I use tamiye dark yellow, bluff, white and clear combination and added some thinner. ratio

X4 Dark yellow
X3 Bluff
X1 White
a little clear
X1 thinner

When I use the airbrush, the paint was like sanded, ( not sure how to describe), it was not smooth, like bazillion mini micro dots. I am pretty sure I did not over painted it, nor stop in a spot for a while, always move back and fort and tried a thiny coat. but after first coat no ntexture visible, where did i wrong and whats the correct formula for keeping the texture after painting.

thanks

Bahadur

Ola Bahadur

To mme it sounds you did not add enough thinner
Your paint should have the consistency of milk. Or even thinner depending a bit on what you use as a compressor and airbrush and how much you can control either paint and airpressure

thinner paint means thinner paintlayers which in turn will preserve your detail. You mention the fact that the paint looked like sandpaper which is a well known problem with Tamiya paint when not thinned enough. You already did step 1 to prevent this by adding some drops of clear in the mix. Now you only have to thin your paint more and you should be good to go.

Thx a lot, will try on my next project.

The roughness is as already mentioned is because you didn't thin your Tamiya paint mixture correctly, and most likely over compensated by increasing the amount of paint, as well as increasing the PSI. Also, you didn't mention what you used to thin the Tamiya acrylic paints.

A standard starting ratio should be 1:1 air brushed @ 17-18 psi. You didn't mention how much clear you added, but it's pretty thick stuff in the bottle. All your paints add up to 8 parts, and lets say you added 1 part clear, so you should have thinned it with 9 parts of thinner.

Hopefully, you used Tamiya X20-A or their lacquer thinner which really works great with their acrylic paints. If you used 70% Iso Alcohol you need to add a few drops to the bottle of a retarder that you can get in a art supply store. Even better is if you can get 50% Iso Alcohol, which really doesn't need any retarder added.

Here's a picture of a conversion I did on a low Bustle M4 turret. I removed the loaders hatch, the pistol port, and the smoke tube. I textured the surface with just Tamiya Gray primer applied with a paint brush. There are several layers of paint, a few washes & filters, and at least 4 coats of Glosscoat and Dullcoat, yet the texture is still there.

Joel

Thanks a lot for the info.

If I understand correctly, thinner paint ratio should be 1/1, and yes I use tamiya X-20 thinner. how far should I use the airbrush from model?

Bahadur

Yes, it's the ratio I always use for Tamiya paints. I generally keep my air brush a max of 3 inches from the model. Most times I'm closer, especially when doing detail work.
Joel

is the distance the same when doing base color?

As a general rule yes. If you get too far away from the model, the acrylic paint will start to dry before it reaches the surface of the model. For a base coat or painting any large area, you really want the paint to almost flow like a gloss paint does but not quite. To little paint, and you get a sandpaper effect just like if the paint wasn't thinned enough.
Joel

Thanks a lot, really helped