Figure painting stuff

[cthulhu77]

I was talking to BDB this morning and mentioned these as very easy to work with figure paints:

http://www.dickblick.com/categories/alkyds/

Then, just a bit ago, I had to thin out some Tamiya acrylic paint with some water...and instead poured a bit of my white wine into it by accident (hey, at least I didn't drink the paint water)...it worked perfectly !!!!!  Much better than their thinner, better than pure alch, and better than water !  Now I have more foil to send up to Baz, too !

[sotoolslinger]

Brilliant I knew there was some use for wine

[jcf]

Tamiya acrylics can also be thinned with lacquer thinner, ditto Gunze. The acrylic resin base used in acrylic paints is naturally not water-soluble,
the paint has to be formulated to allow the resin to be 'suspended' in water to create water thin-able paint, the term water-based is incorrect
when referring to acrylic resin based paints... house, artist's or modeller's. The same basic resins are used to create synthetic acrylic lacquers
i.e automotive lacquers and modelling products like the Tamiya sprays and GSI Mr. Color.
The base is the same the carrier/thinner changes.

The Winsor-Newton alkyd paints are basically a thick version of what folks generally (and somewhat incorrectly) call 'oil-based enamel' paints.
Enamel in paint terminology originally referred to the hard and glossy finish of the paint film i.e. it resembled enamel, rather
than to paint chemistry.

Yep, your old reliable modeling 'enamels' are garden variety alkyd-resin paints, as are the majority of 'oil-based' paints (as opposed to artist's oil paints, those are a different animal).

For those who may be interested Wiki has a pretty good bit on alkyd chemistry:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alkyd

Jon