Has anyone taken a sample of a paint color to a paint store that can match it using a computer? A lot of places will sell you a pint of custom made paint for a reasonable price. ( $5-$6 )
With some model paint getting hard to find, this could be a way to get the colors you need.
That can work, but has its limits. Most regular paint does not have the finely ground pigments of model paint. It’s generally designed to go on thicker. I’ve never tried to airbrush any, but I suspect you’d want to thoroughly filter it before shooting it.
I tried matching Floquil Concrete once a few years ago, to give us something to paint tunnel portals and similar things. It came out too green to be of much use.
I seldom use up jar of model paint - usually it dries up. But I brush paint, maybe airbrushing uses more.
With experimentation, I can usually mix the color I want.
But if you check some of the online stores like Micro-Mark or modeltrainstuff you can probably get the paint you need.
Also, there have been some color charts for matching the old Floquil colors to new colors.
Paul
Actually, an airbrush uses less paint than a brush, partly because it needs to be thinned, but also because it’s possible to apply the paint much more thinly.
Yeah, I find it fairly easy to match colours, too, but very seldom do I use any colour without altering it somewhat, using other colours.
Most of my freight cars are boxcar red, but almost none are an out-of-the-bottle commercially available colour. Instead, I often add a little black, or red, or maybe something else, even when batch painting cars for the same railroad. After all, depending on the date the cars were built, the lading they carried, and the areas where they were in service, they would have weathered differently and accumulated different colours and types of dirt. This can be done during airbrushing, and the differences can also be enhanced later when applying weathering.
I very seldom have paint dry in the bottle: when a colour is used to the point where there’s very little left, the remainder is dumped in with a similar (but not identical) colour, or is simply mixed with other such remnants to make a weathering colour.
When I did painting for others, I often ended up with leftover colours I would never have otherwise used. These could often be altered to something more useful or simply doled out sparingly into other mixes. When all else fails, pretty-well any colour can become a weathering colour
For weathering, the paint is thinned very severely - up to 90% thinner. This allows it to be airbrushed in almost imperceptible layers, building-up the effect gradually.
Wayne
Those machines are not that good to really bad so unless you have someone who knows how to alter the scanner mix, then forget it and I might add that few have that eye and know color formulation. I was tought by a factory color match guy and I will never be half as good as he was.