So I've been experimenting with various primers/paints, namely tamiya, vallejo, and stynylrez. I have noticed something about flat paints that never crossed my mind before. Flat paint is flat because it's rough, of course. Gloss paint is gloss because it's perfectly smooth.
I painted a 1:350 scale Millennium Falcon with Vallejo Model Air White Grey. Under normal lighting conditions the paint job looks very very smooth but with a flat sheen. However, if I take a flashlight from my smartphone and hold it at a glancing angle to the surface, if I look really hard, I can see a micro/pebbly surface.
When painting an object of 1:35 or 1:48 scale it wouldn't really matter. However, if I blew this Millennium Falcon up to actual real world scale, those tiny flat paint granules would now be the size of small rocks sitting all over and covering the Falcon's hull. I even looked at pre-painted factory Bandai kits, and their flat paint also shows this same texture under extremely harsh lighting.
So it got me thinking. Is there a flat paint that has less of this problem, while still renaming flat? Or is it that if flat pigment size were smaller than the human eye can detect, it would again appear "glossy" because it's smoothness is under the visual acuity. At smaller scales than say 1:144 (not to mention 1:350, 1:1000,1:2500), should we maybe be painting semi-gloss instead of flat to compensate for the small scale?
What are your thoughts?
I painted a 1:350 scale Millennium Falcon with Vallejo Model Air White Grey. Under normal lighting conditions the paint job looks very very smooth but with a flat sheen. However, if I take a flashlight from my smartphone and hold it at a glancing angle to the surface, if I look really hard, I can see a micro/pebbly surface.
When painting an object of 1:35 or 1:48 scale it wouldn't really matter. However, if I blew this Millennium Falcon up to actual real world scale, those tiny flat paint granules would now be the size of small rocks sitting all over and covering the Falcon's hull. I even looked at pre-painted factory Bandai kits, and their flat paint also shows this same texture under extremely harsh lighting.
So it got me thinking. Is there a flat paint that has less of this problem, while still renaming flat? Or is it that if flat pigment size were smaller than the human eye can detect, it would again appear "glossy" because it's smoothness is under the visual acuity. At smaller scales than say 1:144 (not to mention 1:350, 1:1000,1:2500), should we maybe be painting semi-gloss instead of flat to compensate for the small scale?
What are your thoughts?