The Chalky Issue Part 1

To start off with this I thought about how I might be able to paint something that would use the types of colors that might have this issue with mostly white paints. And then I remembered a tutorial that I had read called Painting white and thought this is a grate two birds with one stone moment also seeing as he uses the reaper paints that I do.

And here is where the battle commences to defeat the dreaded chalk.




Ok to begin with I needed to decide what I am going to paint and as I am going to be doing this over again until I find a fix for this issue, I thought I would go back to the practice cape that I used for Complementary underpainting Theory and trying to use the colors used in the tutorial painting white, with one color change due to the fact I was unable to find my Pure white.

So for this I decided to try using just distilled water for watering down the paints and to do more layers and water it down more.

The colors I used for this were

Stormy Gray deep shadow
Rainy Gray shadow
Misty Gray basecoat
Linen White Highlight

The linen white was used instead of pure white and pearl white mainly because pearl white has matalic in it.

First, I did the basecoat of Misty Gray watered down a ratio of 1:2 paint to water.

  The first shadow Rainy Gray with a ratio of 1:4 paint to water.

Second shadow Rainy Gray plus part Stormy Gray with a ratio of 1:4 paint to water.

Now up until now I didn't have an issue with the paints and the dreaded chalky effect had not happened up until the first highlight glaze of Linen White which is when things went chalky.

At this point I thought.



But I thought that maybe I might be able to fix this with a glaze of the basecoat so I made a glaze of Misty Gray of 1:5 paint to water. Which I am afraid to say did not help.

So in conclusion and I feel that these issues I am having are around the flesh tones or yellow whites like the linen white I came to this as my first chalky issue happened when I used fair highlight.

So the First Test was


At this point, although the two parts of the recommendations did not work I did notice as I was painting that the paper towel did leave fibers on my paintbrush and that a white hand towel maybe something to look out for in the future.

As it stands, use just water and thin layers have not helped to fix the problem, but there is still more to try. Also, it would be a boring journey if it ended so soon. And by the next time the photos I hope will improve.

List as it stands.

1. Almost white wash to build layers
2. Thin to a whole milk consistency 
3. Thin with water only
4. Shake bottle for a while 
5. Use filtered water to thin
6. Halfords Batter top-up water
7. Towel instead of paper towel to remove excess paint
8. Allow the layers to dry before adding a new layer.
9. Vallejo glazing medium to thin the paint.
10. Vallejo model color ivory.