Also mini-rant triple-post here, but how are we in the year of our lord 2026 and yellow paint
still needs a white base to not look like thin shit? Can't we just put lead into it to make it less transparent or something, it's starting to annoy the fuck out of me.
I dunno someone explain the soyence to me.
Ok... the short version of paint pigment sperging about yellow.
There are a limited number of paint pigments available that get manufactured for the paint industry. And by paint industry I mean automotive and house paint. There's been pigments discontinued over the years for having heavy metals, there's been some discontinued due to lack of interest from buyers. Miniature paint companies are only using what's commonly available. Specifically with yellow...
When it comes to miniature paint, the companies
ALL cheap out. With artist paints, you'll see something on the label called "series" the higher the number, the more expensive the pigment. Normally going from a series 1 to a series 4 or 5 could be a few dollars difference, but then you get shit like yinmn blue(a proper opaque neutral blue) that runs $100+ a tube when the same tube of another pigment could be $8. Specifically with yellow, most of the pigments are transparent and there's nothing you can do about it other than the vendor(miniature paint companies) adding fillers(titanium white pw6), or sometimes other colors including some black pigments to try and get some opacity that way), or even shit like chalk to try and get some opacity. The modern most opaque yellow is Bismuth Vanadate(py184) the most common yellow would be something like Hansa Yellow(py74) which is claimed to be semi opaque but it's still very transparent.
If you were to buy artist acrylic paint(golden, liquitex, schmincke, Lascaux, etc.) , Bismuth Vanadate Yellow costs damn near double what Hansa Yellow does because that py184 is simply a more expensive acrylic. With miniature paints(citadel, proacryl, vallejo, AK, etc.) most customers would freak out at the idea of some paints costing more than others purely because of the pigment used so they either don't, or go with the fillers and shit as previously mentioned, or... in the case of ProAcryl who does have a bismuth vanadate yellow py184 paint(it's in the rogue hobbies signature series), they simply don't use enough pigment to get the opacity to where it would be from the artist acrylic brands that would normally just charge more for it.
This is why it's become common practice with yellow to just use an undercoat color for it like pinks, browns, oranges, etc. to start with and then using the tint strength(which is different than opacity) of cheaper yellow paints over that to get yellow.
This same shit applies to other colors. No miniature paint brand is going to use cobalt blue pb28 due to a: having cobalt in it and b: costing more. Same with cadmium red pr108, cobalt green pg50, etc. But even something like pyrrole red pr254 is still going to cost too much to include an appropriate pigment amount to get proper opacity so even if they did use it, they'll either cheap out with fillers(like pw6, other pigments, or even shit like chalk), when they could use something like napthol crimson pr170 or napthol red pr7 which are both transparent.
The even shorter version:
Basically they're all cheap, and you're looking at the wrong type of paint.
I've seen people use weird things like purple as a base and get the most beautiful yellows ever. Probably some color theory shit a lot of us are too tarded or lazy to get into.
Ok, more paint sperging.
You're correct, it's color theory mixed with an understanding(or just monkey see, monkey do) of the technical aspects of how the colors and pigments work. If you've ever tried mixing paints and wondered why they don't mix like you think they should based on what you were taught in school...
This? This is incomplete and trash, but has never gone away.
This is a better representation of paint pigments on a two-dimensional wheel
You'll notice there's few "pure" pigments for shit like green, blue, red, etc. So mixing a yellow and a blue isn't always going to produce a real green. And of course there's cost of those pigments vs others like I mentioned previously. You can read up more about this here
https://www.handprint.com/HP/WCL/color16.html
A much better color wheel has existed since the fucking 1940s(yes, schools are this late and gay about moving onto newer shit) that is actually 3d and accounts for differences in hue(color), value(whiteness vs blackness), and chroma(how blue a blue is) and you can learn about this here
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Munsell_color_system
But these images should show how lacking the stupid color wheel we've been stuck using for decades is.
Ok, I think that should cover everything for now and leave people with enough info to start down a ridiculous rabbit hole if they want to.
edit: One more thing I've found surprising over the years regarding all of this shit. I didn't go to art school, I've met plenty of people that have and most of them didn't know any of this shit either. Apparently hardly any of this shit is taught because they're too busy focusing on technique and history(which is fine) rather than ever bothering to explain how the fucking medium(artistic medium, in this case paint) actually fucking works. If you're a more technical minded person, and have wondered why the shit seems like fucking voodoo mysticism bullshit, it's because most people teaching it don't know this crap, or don't bother to teach it and expect everyone to just "feel" their way through it just leaving things unnecessarily frustrating.
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