help with mixing paint

[brent 1701]

i cant get the skin color right was told to use flesh red yellow but cant get it just right

[Random Axe]

This really depends on what you are trying to accomplish.

If you are going for total Mego reproduction paint aps, use Games Workshops Dwarf Flesh. It the closest I've seen on the market.

Now, if you are trying to just get a good, semi-realistic flesh, I don't think the red/yellow thing is going to work. Take any cheapo flesh tone you find at a craft store and mix a little pink with a little blueish grey, maybe an antique blue. We're talking eight parts flesh to two parts pink to one part blue. You can always add more you your taste, but you should get a pretty cool color out of that.

The best thing to do is experiment. Sometimes the color you'd think wouldn't work is the perfect choice. Have fun with it.

Scott

[Dave Mc]

I use a store bought flesh, which is real peachy in color, then add a little brown until I get the contrast right. Then I mix in a couple drops of yellow and a couple of red and test it out on a junk head with decent color. You'll be able to tell if you need more of anything. Just keep playing. The first time I mixed a good flesh, it took me a good hour.

[ctc]

Hmmmm....

It depends on the paint you're using. The Games Workshop stuff has a lot of colours, and you can probably find one right off the rack that's really close. (Reaper makes some good paints too, and they're usually a little cheaper than the GW stuff.) I've used Testors enamel "wood" for flesh too. It's close to the Mego caucasian body colour. It's a thick paint, so I use it mostly for custom body parts that done't have a lot of fine detail.

When airbrushing I use Dave's trick of building up a storebought flesh tone. I use a reddish brown as the additive, which saves a bit of work. When using the vinyl paint.... well; THAT'S kind of a nightmare.

Don C.

[YANOULI]

If you are going for total Mego reproduction paint aps, use Games Workshops Dwarf Flesh. It the closest I've seen on the market.

This is what i use.
I find it gives a pretty realistic flesh tone without having to mix colours.

[jessica]

I do what Dave Mc does. Basically I plop the main peach color on a plate, probably a pool about an inch and a half wide, add another pool of several browns touching the pool of peach, and some red on the other side of the peach pool...a very small pool of red. Then I mix the browns and peach together a little bit (not the entire thing)...until I get a small glop of color I'm satisfied with. Once I'm happy with the color, I grab some with my paint brush and set it aside on another area of the plate and thin it out and work with it.

By mixing paint this way, you have the various shades of the same color easily accessible, and you don't really need that much paint for a Mego sized head.

[stuart]

My problem is just mixing enough paint. I'll finally get a color I'm happy with and I don't have enought to finish the job. It is impossible to mix the same color twice. I guess I could be very scientific about it and take careful measuremnts so that once I have a formula I could reproduce it, but hey, where's the fun there?

[Dave Mc]

My problem is just mixing enough paint. I'll finally get a color I'm happy with and I don't have enought to finish the job. It is impossible to mix the same color twice. I guess I could be very scientific about it and take careful measuremnts so that once I have a formula I could reproduce it, but hey, where's the fun there?

I mix it by the bottle. I take an old empty paint bottle, wash it out, and just mix a bunch of it at once. I only have to mix once a year or so.

[MegoMark71]

thanks for the tips

[wayne foundation 07]

I wonder what Home Depot would do if you took a mego head in and asked them to match the color?After all in the commericial they say they can match anything.

[brent 1701]

thanks for the help all

[Brazoo]

Sometimes when I'm trying to match ink for screenprinting I use a digital CMYK file as a guide. If you have a program like Photoshop you could take a pic of the skin tone you want to match, convert the image mode to CMYK and use the eye dropper tool to select the colour you want to match.

You probably won't be mixing from scratch pure primary cyan, magenta, yellow and black paints (hence CMYK), but it might help you roughly see what colours actually make up the flesh tone you want. Just remember that the percentages onscreen are actually much smaller for paint pigment.

Not sure if that's helpful.