I have seen a lot of articles where modelers use an acrylic textured gel for both groundwork and adding mud to models, but is there a textured gel compatible with enamel paints? I have a lot of enamel earth tones that I would like to use.

Thanks!

Do you mean like Tamiya Texture paint? If so I have used enamel based products over the top of it to create earth tones as you said and have encountered no problems.

Hey Karl,

I mean a product that can be mixed with enamel paint to apply layers of mud, similar to the Liquitex and Vallejo products, just mixable with enamels.

Dry pigments and / or powdered chalk or talc could be used to add "body" to enamel paints. The bulk artist acrylic texture pastes use various aggregates to provide the textures.

Acrylic gels are simply the exact same acrylic binders that are in water-based acrylic paints only in a heavier, gel form. They can be reduced or thinned with water and the result is about the same as acrylic mediums.

Acrylic textured pastes are the same acrylic gels with some sort of aggregate added (fine sand, pumice, powdered paper fibers, etc) to create the particular textures. There is nothing particular special about these aggregates. They are simply selected based on the textures.

I think to create the same type of material, only enamel-based, you could follow the same sort of formulation.

The issue, I would imagine, is that actually very little paint is usually used mixed with the acrylic texture pastes in modeling applications. At least, for myself, when I use these, I use them before I apply the color coats and only to texture the surface. (The acrylic texture materials all dry either clear or white out of the bottle.)

I don't normally use these materials on top of the basic finishes, preferring to use pigments for any additional texturing.

So, to make a similar enamel-based formulation would expend large amounts of paint (relatively speaking when you're purchasing paint in 1/2 oz bottles) in order to have the basic binder materials in the mix. You could, perhaps, start with a clear matt or gloss enamel for their binding properties, add the aggregate and then mix with paint for color. You could substitute dry pigments for the color paints. But then, you'd be buying extra clear enamels rather than buying the more common acrylic products. I'm not entirely sure that you could get the economy that you're looking for with this route.

I don't know of any enamel-based product that's comparable to the acrylic gels (highly concentrated acrylic binders), so this part of the "body" of you mix would have to come from either clear or pigmented enamel paint.

If you use the acrylic products purchased in the standard sized containers sold for artists (Grumbacher, Golden, W&N, etc) rather than the little proprietary "weathering" product bottles, the acrylic materials are relatively inexpensive. The same goes for buying the dry pigments.

On the other hand, I'm sure a similar material that's enamel-based could be mixed up.

Hey Mike, thanks for the reply. My goal is to mix a textured gel with AK interactive Kursk earth because it has the right shade that I want. In the past when I mixed the paint with plaster, sand, etc, the shade shifted significantly, turned chalky (as most paints mixed with plaster do), and I could not get the texture I wanted. I figured mixing a textured gel would give me the texture and color I was after.

Would it be possible to add pigments to an acrylic textured gel to color it?