Half of the Grey and Grandure is covered in blue / pink foam. The other half is covered in way too dark paint with some dark green and a bit of yellow. I want light tan. What do I ask / look for? My intention is to: 1) Put down the base coat 2) Create mild variations of color 2a) Slightly different color for each of 4 sections to create a 'visual' separation 2b) Eastern - Industrial, South Eastern - farms and hills to mountains, South Western - Mountains to deserts, Western - Deserts. 3) Loosly put down structures 4) Loosly put some vegetation I'm 67 and amusingly enough I have never had to decide on paint color for large areas. It has always been 'white'. I just don't know paint. To top it off I have limited color vision. I realize that like food, it is all a matter of taste.
First, look in a number of local retailers who sell paints for mistakes or sales. Sometimes someone goofs, but they won't throw out or recycle incorrectly tinted paints. They'll go for 70 cents on the dollar or less, and I often get something I can use that way. It may not be the correct tint, but if it's a good base to use, you can always tint it with some of your own acrylic crafts paints...as I do. Soil isn't really brown, or even tan, unless it's visible as a clay-rich soil on embankments. Most of what we see walking over it, or driving by, is either greenery or greyish. With lots of variation. But almost no tan, brown, black, or red, etc. If you want tan, then go a bit darker than you might feel is correct. We tend to want a lighter tan because the darker stuff doesn't look right. But, tan or darker tan, we will cover much of it with ground foam, bushes, and trees. When your interior lighting reflects off it, you may find that it is better than when you see it under 40 year old flourescent or mercury lamps in the store's interior. This is why you look for 'oops' paint that can serve as an initial base paint, and then tint it to look good. You can trust your eye, but when you go to view an image you take with a camera, and you don't know how to adjust for colour balance, you may find it all very disappointing. In summary, there is no tan. It's all shades of grey, some yellow, some, a little tan if there's lots of clay of some types, not all types of clay are tan...some of it is red, some of it is ocher, some yellow. If you have to rely on someone else to tell you if you have a 'tan', and you're intent is to get it on the layout, tell the person you want something middling, not really a light tint, but not 'shoe brown' either. If there's a mis-tint you can purchase for $20 or $15, that's what you want because you can fiddle with small portions of it to get what your brains says is right to you.
@COverton Thanks! Sorry, for late reply. I scored some miss-mixed white and selected a bit of light tan. Perfect. Thanks for the feedback.
