 Hello everybody and welcome to another hobby cheating video and today's video is going to be a little different but I'm very excited. Today we're going to talk about gold metal paints and why they basically suck. Now I recently did a video on the best acrylic steel paint, however, when we're dealing with golds we have a little bit higher bar to cross. Most gold paints are just worse than steels and there's a very simple reason for that. With steel metallic paints they're usually made from ground up mica pigment or really high quality ones are finely ground aluminum. However, with golds it's not like we're going to actually grind up gold pigment, this isn't a thousand dollar pizza, so we have to use other materials. Occasionally you'll get something like ground up bronze pigment, but oftentimes you're dealing with the same ground up mica or aluminum just dyed a certain color. And the challenge is those dyes then create their own set of problems. Because we have additives in the paint that is further thinning it and manipulating it, then what's going to happen is that paint will cover less well. We have to apply lots of coats to it and in the end it doesn't often actually look like gold because well it's not. So the question is can we get something that actually looks like gold out of miniature paints, out of acrylic miniature paints? And we are going to just be touching on acrylics today. There are other videos we'll do in the future on all the wonderful wide world of non-acrylic metal paints, but today it's just acrylic golds. So come with me on this journey while we look at how not only these types of paints perform, but maybe just maybe how we can get a gold paint using existing tools that actually matches to real gold. So before we ever talk about metal paint, I want to take a moment and talk about real gold because this is going to be the gold standard that we compare everything against. So this is my wedding band that I normally have on my finger. This right here is obviously made of real gold. It's fairly tough and basically this is 18 karat gold. So that's the shine that you get out of it, right? It has an engraving in the middle and so on and so forth. You can see how when I move it around, notice how this part down here, we'll look at where my thumb is, see that like warm yellow light down there and then where the light hits, you get this pure bright white shine, right? You can see things like my fingers reflecting in it because it's highly polished gold, all these kinds of things. But this is effectively, you know, highly polished real gold. This right here, my wife was nice enough to lend to me and I have to give back. This is a real gold nugget that was in her family and was then stamped down flat and made into a little brooch for a necklace, right? So this is literally a pure gold nugget and you can see how again, shiny, how reflective it is and how it looks. This is the color of real gold. This is actual gold pulled up out of the earth in nugget form and squished flat. So this is what we're aiming at, right? And you'll notice how bright and reflective it is. Notice it's not actually super yellow. It's not actually super orange or anything like that. A lot of these colors that we tend to have in our golds. So this is going to be the standard against which we compare our final product and whether or not we are succeeding in achieving gold. All right. Let's begin at the beginning. So we've got eight shields here and we're going to apply one pass of all these golds and we're going to be fairly heavy, heavier than you could be probably with a miniature. Every time is with a clean brush, it's moist, never wet. We're not overly thinning. All of these paints have spent at least one full minute on a vortex mixer and all of them have agitators in them. So there should be no excuses here. And right away, you can already see when I hold some of these up, they're immediate failures. Part of the challenge when you're using these types of paints is first of all, the color differences in these are absolutely hilarious to me. Every one of these paints has gold or something like it in the title and yet their colors could be more different. The air paint really is just bronze. I don't even know what that's meant to be. And all of them have these wildly different tones, wildly different opacities and coverage characteristics. Each of them, and I didn't pick any that are really, really horrible that I knew were straight out like Vallejo model color or something, although the war colors here did turn out to be very underwhelming. I think that paint might have just been dead. It spent five minutes on the vortex mixer and I still with an agitator. I think it just died. But I tried to pick ones that I thought were popular that people liked and every time I could see streaking, I didn't get good coverage and their colors are just nothing at all close to the actual product. Here they are close up with their gold. Look at the streaking on this stuff. I mean, you can still very clearly see the gray underneath. Let's go even faster. Okay, fine. Two coats, right? And before anyone says anything, I can see you typing already. No, I'm not going to put these over brown. I'm not going to paint a part of the miniature a different color, just to paint a metal paint on. That's nonsense. That shouldn't be required. The product should just work. And if it isn't doing that, it's bad and we use something else. So I put two full coats on. So here you can see them in close up, aligned with the paint that was used after two full coats of the product. And again, I would never actually want to use two full coats of something just to establish a base coat of metal. The classic gold, very streaky, left a lot of the underlying primer showing through. Shiny gold covered a little better, but it's quite dull, although it is closer in tone. Greedy gold isn't even close. It's some kind of orange color and was very streaky. The Balthazar gold air color, again, I don't even know what's going on here. It's certainly not gold. Retributor armor had the best overall coverage, but again, it's so yellow. It looks like cheese. The war color has just failed, as I said. I think the paint died. And then finally, the Scale 75. Elf gold, decent enough color tone, but not there. So let's make something real. Vallejo metacolor, gold, and copper. Everybody complains the gold is very green. That's true. But green plus red equal brown. So what we're going to do is we're going to take three drops of the gold and mix it with two drops of the copper. And we're going to mix that up really well. And the first thing you're going to notice when you make this combination is that right away you get a nice, rich tone. I've used this combination for a lot of projects, and it gives you a pretty good, rich gold. As you can see, it covers pretty well. This is an unprimed surface. I'm literally just throwing paint on here. There's no reason for paint to stick well to this or show well on this. And yet it covers pretty well. And even without anything to it here, it's not too bad. It's a little more pale than the gold, but it has a really high shine, which can cover over a lot. Let's make it better. This is Green Stuff World's antique gold pigment. I'm going to take, this is the 164th teaspoon. I'm going to take half of that. So one, one-twenty-eighth of a teaspoon of that pigment. I'm going to mix it in there. So if you doubled up the amount of drops, you'd use the normal 164th. Then I'm going to put in a single drop of flow aid as my only additive, so flow improver, just to get that pigment mixed around easily with the underlying paint, okay? Then we mix, we mix, we mix, we mix, we mix. Just mix the heck out of this. Now look how much richer that gold already looks. Look how much more in-tone it appears when you add that pigment to it. The metal color having these wonderful properties being so liquid, being having a high opacity. Now, when we put on, look at that. Smooth, instant, high opacity, high shine, beautiful reflectivity. Like now we've got gold, all right? Instantly, we get a different experience, but we've got to keep to the same experiment. So let's go ahead and take another shield and let's go ahead and turn this thing gold. That recipe is something that I just kind of have experimented with and stumbled upon. But what I love about it is I never have to go over it more than once to get a base coat. It covers cleanly. It's liquidy enough that it applies smoothly, runs right off the brush. There's no squidginess to it. It just works. And look at that gold. Now look at how close that is to that gold nugget. Look at those color tones, how they both are reflecting the same colors, shining the same light reflections back. Now, certainly the paint doesn't have the exact same reflectivity. That's true, but it's so much closer. Here they are all, here are all of them next to that one on the bottom, the mixture we had there. There they are. Beautiful. When we put them next to each other, you just really see the difference. Look at what I got out of one pass of that mixture, as opposed to two passes of everything else, and how much closer it is to the actual gold. So there you go. That's how you get real looking gold. And here I'm just going to move the camera around and give you a great view of how reflective it is. Give this a like if you liked it. Subscribe for additional hobby cheating in the future. If you've got questions, drop them down below. But thanks for watching, and we'll see you next time.