One piece of advice one can repeatedly read on the internet is to properly thin one's acrylic paints with water. Why? Because it conserves details on the miniature.
Check out this back shot of pGrim, he has a rather thick layer of paint. (it's GW Foundation paint, Tausept Ocre, to be exact)
I have seen worse than my pGrim by people who either (a) don't use proper paint for wargaming miniatures, but regular paint like you use it on benches etc, and (b) people ruining their minis with excessive use of Army Painter Quickshade.
On the other hand, I know I can do better by thinning down my paints with more water as you can see on this Thunderhead:
When painting this guy I added more water than usually and the details are more crisp.
So how much water in one's paint is the right amount? It's hard to say... the best explanation I got myself so far is from a Swiss player named Krog-gar (Knights of the Table) who explained that one needs to add as much water until the paint drips off the brush easily. However, if it quickly and steadily drips, you have added too much water. If you wait like five minutes for a drop to fall, you don't have enough water in your paint.
So, if I knew how much water I was supposed to add, why didn't I do it?
Out of laziness.
This is how my palette after the last painting adventure looked like:
When I was putting paint onto my palette, I always added just enough water, but the point is on a simple plastic palette like this one the paint quickly dries. As a matter of fact, you can easily spot the crater holes where the paint already started to dry and I tried to get some still moist paint from the center with my brush. Yes, one could constantly add water, but that's a hassle.
That's where a wet palette comes into the game. The basic point behind a wet palette is to keep your paints save/paintable for days or even weeks when you have done certain mixes, but are not able to finish painting a certain color in one go. However, I found that the true value out of a wet palette for me is that pants don't dry while I am painting!
The idea of a wet palette is very simple: you pick a container, add water, add a sponge, and on top of the sponge you put a sheet of baking paper to mix your paints on. The moisture moving through your sponge and baking sheet will prevent your paints on top of the paper from drying in.
Now why did pGrim end up like this? Because I was too lazy to set up this:
This is a monster of a wet palette with a sponge that can be used for a car wash or other stuff around the household. With that you can store paints for weeks! The only problem that prevents me from using it anymore is mold. I used to paint in a cool/cold cellar and down there mold never was an issue. However, now that I paint in my apartment where it is constantly around 19-20°C I have mold on my baking paper after two to three days.
And that's why I went back to the simple plastic palette.
And that's why I started to build a new wet palette, something smaller that I won't use to store paints, but keep them moist enough as I paint. That's where my latest purchases, Trollblood Champions and Long Riders came in really handy as they have a perfect piece of foam for a small wet palette. After that I just had to find a proper container:
And this is for my Swiss readers so they can figure out where to get it:
And these are the models I will paint next with my new wet palette. :-D
Let's see if we can spot a difference between pGrim and eGrim. :-D
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