I picked up some of the Tru-Color paints recently. From what I can tell, I really like their colors. They are a solvent (acetone) based acrylic. I've got a handful of other paints, but not many. I picked up a several Scalecoat and Scalecoat II paints, but found that I didn't care for some of the colors. Particularly the Pullman Green. Also, the majority of the paints I have are somewhat old, and I've found they aren't working as well as I'd hoped.
The Tru-Color paints are based off of the well respected Accupaint line. In addition, being a new paint line, I know that the bottles haven't been sitting on a hobby shop shelf for 10 years. In addition, they are releasing a whole series of box car brown/red colors, matched from actual color chips courtesy of Ed Hawkins.
Having come back to the hobby after painting RPG miniatures for about 20 years, one thing I have found that I don't like is paint pots. I had a full set of Reaper paints, and both they and Vallejo use small dropper bottles. Vallejo has released some railroad colors in the past, but they don't have a huge selection. Anyway, the dropper bottles make it easy to mix to specific ratios but just counting drops. There is virtually no clean-up, and the paints keep for a very long time in bottles like these.
So I've transferred the paint to the same kind of bottles. I was going to write up what I've done, but I found a great blog entry when looking for a source for the bottles:
It's from an RPG/War Gaming blog, but like the military modelers I find that there are a lot of things we can learn from the RPG miniatures guys as well.
Incidentally, it's vital that you use the LPDE bottles for Tru-Color paints since they contain acetone. It's not very expensive to do this, I highly recommend it. Since the bottles are only 1/2 oz, and the Tru-Color paint comes in 1 oz (supposedly) bottles. I've been able to make a second set for Chris. I have found that the amount of paint in the original bottles is somewhat inconsistent. I haven't graduated the dropper bottles to see if I'm getting the full 1 oz. Considering that for many colors I'll need very little, and others I'll be buying a lot more, it's not a big deal to me.
Now I've got to practice painting...
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