Can You Thin Tamiya Acrylic Paint With Water

The amount of water you add.

Can you thin tamiya acrylic paint with water. Especially if you are heavily reducing the paint. Acrylic medium minimizes the need for the addition of water and allows the paint to sit on top of the surface maintaining a rich glossy appearance. What do you thin tamiya acrylic with for airbrushing. Not enough artists and especially up and coming artists realize that adding too much water to acrylic paints breaks down the binder some refer to it as the vehicle that holds the pigment together.

How this paint reacts depends on the surface on which it is being painted. It all depends on the results you want. If you use iso or tamiya s own acrylic thinner you can take it up to about three parts thinner to one part paint and then much past that and it will start to bead and behave like it s thinned with water. If you do want to thin your paint dramatically with water it is possible to use more than 50 percent according to nancy reyner author of acrylic revolution on her painting blog reyner says that she sometimes uses a ratio of 80 percent water to 20 percent paint in what is called overdiluted paint.

Denatured alcohol will allow you to go much thinner while retaining adhesion i ve taken it to 90 thinner and still had good coverage. I use the thinner from the line of paints im using at the time i use tamiya for tamiya citadel for citadel vallejo for vallejo etc. I use tamiya s acrylic paints for 98 of my work. I am using 10 15psi richard.

However using a significant amount of water to reduce your acrylic paint can result in some undesirable outcomes. To thin i use tamiya x 20a or testor model master acryl thinner 50496 i pay 4 99 for a 118ml bottle both with great results. I have previously used tamiya and gunze acrylics and alcohol water isopropyl alcohol always worked well. Water breaks down the binder in acrylic thinning the paint so that it looks like watercolor and allows it to sink into the surface resulting in a matte finish.

For this experiment it s important that you thin the acrylic paint using water in exactly the same way that you thinned it with the purpose made tamiya thinner. By keeping everything totally consistent except for the thinning agent you ll be able to get the very best comparison on exactly how well it performs. Using water to thin acrylic paint can be done but is preferred using distilled water. If you re wondering why you shouldn t use water to thin a water based paint let s take a look at why.

Tamiya s water based acrylic paint can be thinned with their proprietary x20 a acrylic thinners iso propyl alcohol ipa distilled water and i ve even shown that it can be thinned with regular tap water with outstanding results but few people seem to realise that it can also be thinned with tamiya lacquer thinner. You can use water to thin acrylic paints ive used ro water which i use for my fish tanks to thin when ive run out of propper thinners.