Painting Kimera Kolors

[Auberon]

Kimera Kolors advertises itself as the paints which can create every color in your mind.  This is true... if you are willing to mix your paints.  As someone who already does so to an extent I decided to pick their paint up during their kickstarter last year, but I haven't had the time to do much with them.  Time to dust them off and paint something! I'm sure I'll go back and forth between too many pictures and not enough, but sometimes you just forget about the camera.

 

My original plan had been to use this 3D print as not only a test piece, but to be a nicely painted test piece.  Unfortunately after I printed it I discovered that it is one of those models where some of the details are super shallow.  A few coats of paint and there won't be any details left. Disappointed, she was demoted to just a test piece.

 

 

So this exercise was to be painting an entire model using the bare minimum of paints - the primaries.  This is not how you would normally go about it considering how pigments grey out, but if you've never done it before it is good practice to see how paints work.  In this case I'm creating a cold pallet. We have white, black, cold yellow, phthalo blue green shade (a cold blue), and magenta (a cold red). (As an aside, if you were to throw in some secondaries you would have a complete pallet, but that is for another time.)

 

 

One of Kimera's primary selling points is that they are pure pigments, unlike other brands of hobby paints, and proudly stamp their bottles just like the art companies do. In this case my Kimera magenta is PR122, just like my Golden paint.  The Kimera paints are matte, but if I need gloss I can pull out a Golden sub.

 

 

The wet pallet.

 

 

To start I'm going to mix a Caucasian skin tone. First use yellow + red to make orange.

 

 

Then desaturate with a touch of blue. And I do mean just a touch.  Phthalo = potent.

 

 

Then add a bunch of white until an intermediate tone is reached. Also, not sure what my camera focused on here.

 

 

To create highlights add white + a touch of yellow.

 

 

And repeat. Some of these obviously have a bit too much yellow in them but that is what practice is for.

 

 

You can do the same thing in the opposite direction but black is also potent so it will get dark quickly.  Making the shadows a bit purple will contrast with the yellow in the highlights and add more pop.

 

 

Here she is basecoated with the initial skintone. It is a bit on the red side.

 

 

And a few shadows with the first shadow mix.

 

 

The first highlight mix, though normally this would be closer to my initial coat.

 

 

Going up in the highlight mixes.

 

 

And another. By the time I got the paint mixed I was running out of paint time so it was just getting slapped on to see how it looks.

 

 

And smear the final highlight over everything! OK, that's not how to paint, but it does show off how much contrast there is between the colors when they are side by side.

 

 

And tone it back down a bit. It's really dry here and my paint started getting a little thick.  It might not show up well here but her face is getting overworked by this point.

 

 

Next, more mixing and hopefully more time for painting.

[aku-chan]

Very impressive!

I still struggle to paint skin without using skin paint.

[Auberon]

Round 2.  Same pallet as before, but I'm going to mix more, but use a bit less magenta.

 

 

And skip ahead, though I used the same process as before. My cheap One Happy Choice brush that I was using as a mixing brush is so cheap that the paint is falling off the handle, hence all the little black flakes.

 

 

The new basecoat. The cold red in the skin is more appropriate for northern Europe vs. southern.

 

 

And highlight till I run out. Right after this pic I went to try something else on the face and the realized I didn't have anymore highlights left.  She won't have much of a face for the rest of the trial.

 

[Zloyduh]

Step by step face painting - great work! 

[Auberon]

The curse of the wet pallet (or at least for me) is that once I close the lid and walk away I come back to puddles. I wonder what's left?

 

 

Welp, there went my yellow and magenta.  What can we do with white, blue, and black?  The answer is super easy blue steel. Take some black, mix in some blue, and then add successively more white to create the gradient.  I think I just made the Scale75 NMM paint set. Really all you need to do is figure out your ratio of blue to black and you are set.

 

 

I based the sword with the mix on the far right. See all the decorative work on the blade that is in the render?  Yeah, barely raised above the surface.

 

 

Now to add some shadows/highlights along the blade.

 

 

And then on the top.

 

 

Now to wipe that off the pallet and try mixing another color.

[chaosscorpion]

Looks Great,  Love the Sword Color and the NMM is looking awesome.

[Auberon]

Just because you can't doesn't mean you should.  Perhaps that doesn't really apply here, but both of these practice mixes are something that there will probably never be a reason to make from scratch.  In both cases there are already several paints already available to just start from without mixing.

 

Since I did NMM last time, this time I'll do some gold.  For gold I start with an ochre.  The exact shade isn't super important and any hobby paint line is going to have one (hence my comment above), but it's not going to be pure yellow. We need to desaturate it for this to work. Mixing red an blue made violet, which is complementary to yellow.  We can use that but... yup all three are also used to make skin.  My first shot at it I got the ratio wrong and made a skintone.  Attempt #2 worked and you can see it on the right. 

 

 

On the sword. I didn't mix much so this was as far as I went.

 

 

My camera decided to focus on the background here, but do you remember seeing a greenish color on my pallet earlier? While too much is obviously a problem, a little bit over the gold will actually enhance the highlights. I only went over the lower loop, but maybe better luck seeing it in the last pic.

 

 

So, still some stuff on the pallet.  Next, try mixing a brown.  Brown is just orange plus black.  There are enough browns out there it is unlikely someone would need to make one from scratch, but it is still useful practice for taking a brown you like and then generating the highlight and shadow colors.

 

 

And on the mini. Not only is there wood, but you can hopefully see how the green made the gold more saturated.

 

 

That's about it for the primary color practice.  I'll keep her around as a test piece, but for next time I'll work on something I want to finish.

[Count Urlik]

This is super inspiring stuff!  Thank you!

[Samedi]

It was very interesting to follow this experiment! Thanks a lot!

[Auberon]

I hadn't planned on stopping this WIP there, but February turned into a really bad month. I wasn't even home for most of it. There's another figure ready to go if I can ever get back to painting.

[Arc 724]

On 3/2/2023 at 9:10 PM, Auberon said:

I hadn't planned on stopping this WIP there, but February turned into a really bad month. I wasn't even home for most of it. There's another figure ready to go if I can ever get back to painting.

It's all good. We all know the feeling of time slipping away from our painting time. Post when you can. 🙂