A Cure to the "Vallejo Shine"

So one of the frustrations that I've had with Vallejo paints (both Game Color and Model Color) is that when I go to first use some of them, they come out glossy.  Reds in particular have been notorious for this.  I call this effect the "Vallejo Shine" and I recently found the cure.

While I was at GenCon this year I attended a class taught by Zack Lanier.  He recommended doing additives, which I had tried to no avail.  Then one of the other students in the class mentioned something really simple that turned out to be exactly what I needed.  His recommendation was to add an agitator to the bottle.

The problem with the Vallejo paints is they need to be mixed thoroughly and just casually shaking the bottle isn't good enough.  An agitator is simply a solid object dropped into the paint bottle to help mix it when it is shaken.  When you use spray paint and shake the can you'll hear something inside the can clanking.  That's an agitator in there.

Here, for example, is one of my VGC greens that has the Vallejo Shine.  Notice that not only is it shiny but it's also kind of transparent?  This is straight out of the bottle with no thinning.  What happened is the mix that came out contained less pigment than it should have and more of the binder and medium.  This is not what I want.

So what I am going to use here for an agitator is a simple screw I picked up at the hardware store.  Note that it must be small enough to fit into the bottle.  You can use anything as long as it's not going to corrode and effect the paint.  It also has to be dense enough to penetrate the thickness of the paint all the way to the bottom of the bottle.  If it just floats in the paint mixture it's not going to help much.

In this example I'm placing a zinc-plated screw into the paint bottle head first.  It probably doesn't matter which way you put it in but logically with the screw head down it should help pull more of the denser material up.  Also there might be better choices than zinc-plated, but they are cheap and appear to do the trick.

Once the agitator is in I give the paint a good shake.  If you can't hear the agitator clacking against the inside of the bottle, it might not be doing much.  Now I take a drop of the paint and redo my sample swatch on the bottle top.  I do this without thinning or additives.  The idea is to determine how the paint will behave straight out of the bottle.

 

There's still a bit of sheen and that's mostly because it's not completely dry.  It's still also a little translucent but that's normal for some paints.

So there you have it.  The solution to a problem that has plagued me for months and now paints that I had shelved as useless are once again useful!  I hope this has been helpful and if you have any additional tips for dealing with this problem feel free to share them in the comments below.