Inks and paints, what is the difference

[Abomination]

Please excuse my perhaps noobish question, I am relatively young in hobby years and I've got more and more confused lately about the references to inks and paints. I've read some painting guides that said you should first do some paint and then some ink and I'm wondering what they are referring to. Is it a way to separate the Foundation Paints and - for example - Regal Blue, or is it a different set of .. "stuff" from the GW range?

[antilles13]

I don't think GW does inks as such anymore, but where a paint guide says to use ink it will be for shading, and for that you can use a GW wash of the appropriate colour. They're effectively like very thin paint that will run into all the recessed areas on a model to make them look darker as if they are in shadow.

 

Foundation paints are thicker than standard GW paints and are generally for doing the model's basecoat, i.e. the first colour coat over the undercoat, as they should generally go one in one coat, without needing mulitple coats to stop the undercoat colour showing through.

 

Hope this was vaguely helpful.

[Gurth]

The difference is that a paint is a suspension of a pigment in a binder, usually made thinner by adding a solvent; ink is a solution of a pigment or a dye in a liquid. In practice the difference is that paint is fairly thick while ink is thin; paint covers reasonably while ink covers poorly; and ink gives a more intense colour than paint does. Additionally, paints are usually available in many more colours than inks are, the latter being limited to basic colours like blue, red, orange, green, and so on rather than several shades of each of these.

 

As for GW paints and inks: they used to make bottles of ink in various colours that were used to, for example, quickly apply shadows to models. For example, you would paint your model's trousers tan and then apply a brown ink over this to create shadows in the folds of the clothing. GW removed these inks from its colour range and replaced them by what they call "washes," which are actually translucent paints rather than true washes (a true wash is normal paint that is thinned so much it does not cover well anymore, creating a similar effect to inks but with a less intense colour). You can still buy inks from other manufacturers, though.

[Abomination]

Excellent, thank you guys for clearing it up for me.