 Hello everybody and welcome to another hobby cheating video and today we're gonna take a deep dive into paint Additives what they are how you can use them and how they can help you on your painting journey. Let's get into it The strict technomancer that is Vincy V. Let us get to the technique and learn it Vincy V So if you've ever been in a game store or looked at a range of paints You've undoubtedly seen seen painting additives So these are things like thinner medium or flow improver or drying retardant or anything like that And we're gonna cover all of those today Each of these though can be a little mystical as to exactly how to use them What are they for and how to get the best results out of them? So I'm gonna tackle each of them in turn We're gonna talk about what they're good at when you'd want to use them and the pitfalls of each individual one The first thing we'll talk about here though before we get into the additives is we need to understand paint itself so before we begin with the The additives what is actually in a bottle of paint? Well acrylic paint consists of three elements Okay, three basic elements as all paints effectively do the first is a binding agent a binder And in our case that is acrylic medium acrylic medium is water soluble It dries and forms into a sort of crystal latticework making it highly durable and because it is water Soluble we'll talk about that in a second that means it dries really quickly because as water evaporates it dries The second element in our paint is our solvent and our solvent is water We thin our paints with water. This is how our paint acrylic paint stays largely non-toxic It's water and acrylic medium neither of which are very toxic. I mean I wouldn't drink acrylic medium or anything But it's not gonna kill you just for having fumes around which is nice unlike a lot of other paints And so the solvent is how we thin the paint how we break it down And if you put too much water in then the acrylic medium the binder can no longer bind and That's when you get tide marks and coffee staining and all sorts of bad effects the last element of our acrylic paints is Pigment probably not too surprising, but this is what actually makes it have color what makes it paint So and there's lots of different pigments oftentimes There'll be it's very rare that most of the hobby paints we use our single pigment though some are Most of them are mixtures of different pigments to get to the varied and interesting colors We want to paint our tiny little plastic toys now most hobby paints actually have additional elements in them as well Those three are sort of what makes up a basic paint and there are a lot of artist grade paints out there that might only Contain those three elements However, that's uncommon for most of our hobby paints to consist of only those three things Most of them already have additives in them in fact, they probably already have some amount of like drying retardant or additional binding agent or Flow improver or things like that in them because paint ranges when people when companies are trying to make them they want them to perform and act relatively Uniformly so they'll all be matte to roughly the same degree or they'll all have roughly the same amount of opacity or whatever Whatever the company's goal might be with the hobby paint range to make it easier to work with But that's not how actual artist paints work Artist paints are incredibly varied some are very glossy some are very matte some are satin Some are highly opaque some are not and you see that through simple Identifications on the bottle most artist grade stuff actually has all of that very clearly spelled out but as Our hobby is not for artists primarily what I mean by that is like a lot of us who are just hobbyists We just pick up and start painting because it's fun and we want to play with our toys It's they simplify it and so to simplify the paints down you have to add a bunch of other junk in So it's important to understand that when we're dealing with our paints They already have some of this stuff present and so we need to be careful sometimes of how much more we put into the mix Let's start with the simplest and basic additive What's often labeled as thinner medium or some earth or something like that? But it's really just an acrylic glaze medium. All this is is just paint Without the pigment. So usually this is some amount of acrylic medium and water just ready to go and This can be added very easily into your paint to as it says thin it down And this is one of those things that's actually quite safe to add to paint in a decently large amount All you will effectively do is dilute the ratio of pigment to binding agent without affecting the solvent so the By doing that you're effectively going to make your paint thinner and thinner and thinner and thinner Turning it more when more and more translucent or effectively into a glaze So if you've had problems making glazes in the past thinner medium could be the exact answer for you Because it allows you to thin the paint while still keeping it so the pigment will evenly disperse across the surface The difference between adding this and water. Is it the solvent that is water will break up the pigments? Sorry the binder's ability to actually form that crystal lattice and then deposit the pigment evenly across the surface Not true when we thin with thinning medium or acrylic medium or whatever in this case it just spreads out more Medium over the whole thing and in fact thinner medium can be a really interesting tool To do additional sort of feathering and blending where you just kind of apply it wet to a surface Apply your paint and then blend into it This is actually a really easy trick for making a glaze on a miniature It's something you don't see a lot of people do but it's a really fun way to use thinner medium That will keep your paint evenly distributed So effectively you just take an area of your miniature you want to blend into You place some of that thinner medium there wipe some of it wet across the surface dip your brush into The paint apply the paint to one of the dry spots and then swooshy swooshy swooshy Bring it down into the area where the medium is there and still wet and ta-da it thins out quite naturally So pretty cool trick with thinner medium But all in all with your if you're having trouble thinning paints You find that they break down or you get a lot of coffee staining or anything like that Thinner medium is the way to go quite safe to use in relatively large amounts because it's just more binder Next up we have flow improver now this gets labeled in a lot of different ways So like You'll suddenly see a called airbrush flow improver or just flow improver or lots of things like that You can get this at the art store And in fact for all of these I'm talking about the kind of pure versions of these Gaming companies will often relabel these with goofy names I will talk about that a little at the end But with all of these you can just go to the art store and get big bottles of acrylic medium and flow improver and drying retardant And that is the way to go if you want these don't buy these from from hobby stores for the most part There are a couple like what you see me using here today from huge miniatures That I actually do support because they sell it in very large bottles at a very reasonable price So they're actually a company. I really like how they distribute this not these tiny little bottles that are overpriced now Back to this flow improver flow improver is Responding to the reality of acrylic paints So if I said you need a flow improver for oil paints that wouldn't really make any sense That's already in part of how you work with it it with its solvent with white spirits the problem is Water our solvent in acrylic paints Well, it has a very high surface tension If you've ever done the little trick where you put a drop of water or more drops of water on a penny And you can see it form the little convex surface. That's surface tension in play Flow improver is basically like dish soap It breaks up that surface tension and makes it so the water doesn't bond as easily to each other and just flows out everywhere So flow improver will still thin your paints and that's an important thing to understand Anything you're adding to the paint that isn't paint will thin the paint This feels like a really obvious point But it's one that's important to make in that you are reducing the opacity of your paint the coverage of your paint whether you're doing thinner medium flow improver or drying retardant All of those will reduce those things So you have to be careful with something like flow improver if you add too much flow improver Your paint will simply stop working. This is one of the challenges This one actually does have a sort of limit because if you apply if you get too much of it, not only will it Make it so there's no surface tension But it'll also make it so the the crystalline lattice of the acrylic medium can't ever set up because all of the liquid is too busy Just sliding right off the surface and going down into the recesses You can accidentally make a sort of superwash that just will cross cause coffee staining and that kind of thing everywhere So with flow improver less is definitely Flow improver can be used to make your own washes if you're just thinning your paint or an ink or anything like that You can just thin that out and with flow improver and you will get that response a couple drops We'll make it so your paint acts like a wash flowing quickly into the recesses and staining the flat surfaces and the upper surfaces less So and the more you add the more that effect will be present The other use of flow improver that I always end up using it for is for freehand or sharp thin lines or you know when you really need to get at that small space so if you have trouble maybe getting eyeballs painted or Doing tattoos or you know really getting sharp edge highlights a little dab of flow improver can actually really help you achieve that Just it doesn't take very much But a little bit of flow improver will help your paint just wick much more naturally and easily off the end of your brush Because that same surface tension that's keeping that water droplet on top of the penny is also Holding the water together in your brush and making it not want to go over and flow on to the other surface One last tip for flow improver. I actually always put a few drops of it in my water Like my paint water. So my paint water. I generally have like five six seven drops of flow improver in there Flow improver is also sometimes called surfic tent. There is a slight difference But for the most part we're just gonna say they're the same thing here gives the nuances don't really matter too much for us in our particular hobby and I keep a couple of drops in there for two reasons one It will help release and get any paint out of your brush when you're swooshing your brush or brush around and cleaning it So that's nice and two The fact that it that we tend to often thin our paints with a little bit of water from our paint water cup and So there's just a tiny bit of flow improver in then all of our paint Making it flow better and more naturally without ever risk really risking changing its properties It's a very minor change But I found it actually has a significant impact in the application my paint and just makes it a lot easier for me to Just get going and working quickly and doing sharp thin lines So just some drops in your paint water and you're good to go. All right Our last major one is sometimes called slow dry medium or drying retardant or anything like this But effectively it is a medium that and this may shock you slows the drying time of acrylic paint Acrylic paint one of the reasons we love it is because it dries so fast unlike oil paint Which can take days or weeks to cure completely Acrylic paints dry in a matter of seconds wonderful for having nice fast durable paint jobs and grinding our way through armies Horrible when we need to achieve some nice smooth blends Drying retardant is a way that you can increase the working time of your paint The downside of it though is that a lot of drying retardants out there are utter and complete garbage If you ever have a drying retardant that is a gel or something like that that is useless get rid of that that is no good But there are many companies like what you see me using here that have perfectly liquid normal drying retardants You can also buy this from the art store that works in the same way Drying retardant can help you be Better at achieving those nice buttery smooth blends But you have to be very careful with it just like with flow improver less is definitely more If you add too much of this and you try to do something like wet blending The problem is you will thin the paint so much it then will get splotchy and won't effectively blend together That being said a little drop of drying retardant on your palette And then sort of dipping your brush in and working with the paint and then dipping your brush in and working with the paint And then wet blending together in that way That can be a great tool you need very little of this Because you're not looking to extend the drying time of acrylic paint by five or six or seven or ten times To allow for more efficient wet blending you really only need to extend it by about twice as long And it doesn't take much drying retardant to achieve that So just a little bit in your brush when there's already when your brush is already moist We'll do most of the work you need Last thing I want to talk about here is kind of a catch-all of these other gaming named things Glaze mediums and lamia mediums and stuff like this All of those are just mixes Of the existing things that I've talked about sometimes within also a varnish in there So some of them might have a little bit of varnish Which is I mean we all know a varnish is to there to seal and it usually has a polyurethane base It's there to protect our miniatures, but it'll either have some gloss or satin element or something like that Uh those I don't like as much. I'll be honest with you So anything that isn't sort of clearly labeled in the ways that I've described here I don't love because I don't know exactly what the mix is here. What's the ratio in this random product of thinner to flow improver to drying retardant to varnish to water And most of these products contain all five of those things. It's just the ratios are wildly different Which achieves different effects. So it makes it hard to know exactly what to do My advice to you is something like what you've seen me use here today Or go to your local sort of art and craft store buy a big bottle. They're usually not that expensive And when I'm talking a big bottle I mean you'll get 10 12 15 dollars. You'll have a bottle that will last you the rest of your life So that's a relatively good investment and Those you know for sure what you're getting what's in the bottle. They're they're you know artist grade stuff And there you can then really control your ratios and make sure that you're not sort of Overthinning or suddenly hitting your paint with a bunch of properties that you didn't want didn't need and most importantly Didn't expect and then fundamentally changing the properties of that paint in a way that then doesn't perform for you on the manager There we go So that's your guide to the three main paint additives and some of these other products that are on the market I hope this helps you and gives you some cool ideas for some neat stuff to try out in your own hobby This is all stuff that I utilize quite frequently. So if you enjoyed this, hey, give it a like Subscribe for additional hobby cheating in the future. We have new videos here every saturday If you've got any questions about additives or mediums or anything like that that I didn't answer in this video Drop those down in the comments below. I always answer every question asked If you want to support the channel, it's very easy to do so. There's a merch store down there There's links down there for amazon to buy some of the stuff that we've talked about today You can hit those up You can of course also join our patreon Our patreon is focused on review and feedback and taking your next step on your hobby journey We'd love to have you as part of the community As always though, I thank you so much for watching this one And we'll see you next time