Bronze Brown

A bronze brown tone between skin and metal

Bronze Brown holds the middle ground between tanned skin and tarnished bronze. It has no metallic sheen, only the color bronze takes on after years in the air, so it is used in two ways: as the dark skin of figures from southern lands and as a ground under genuine metallic shades. In the second case it gives the resulting metal a warmth that an aluminum or brass pigment on its own lacks.

The air is half the result

With paints prepared for spraying, the smoothness of a surface is often decided by the source of air rather than by the shade itself. A diaphragm compressor without an air tank pulses and leaves fine ripples on an area. Water condensed in the line appears as a drop in the middle of a finished area. The answer is a moisture trap directly at the airbrush and a stabilized pressure of around one bar; both pay off more than buying another shade.

How the coats follow on

A darker ground belongs under this paint, so that the resulting tone does not stay raw, and above it either a glaze of genuine metal or a brown wash. A combination of both gives the most credible old bronze: first the metallic cast, after drying a sealing with varnish and only then a greenish verdigris into the hollows. Without the sealing intermediate stage the metallic coat would smear during the shading.

Do not return the rest of the paint from the cup into the bottle, as contamination shortens the shelf life of the whole package.

Mixed with ocher it shifts toward a light tanned skin, with a dark red, on the contrary, toward freshly cast metal. Try both positions out on a test piece of plastic before you touch a finished figure.