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mikkupikkulast Thursday at 2:34 PM2 repliesview on HN

Makes me wonder if they ever used the same sort of gimmicky paint, like paint with mica flakes to make something look metallic.


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hibikirlast Thursday at 4:11 PM

They couldn't use the same paint, if just because for miniature painting we are almost always running acrylics, so it's all plastic binding the pigments. Even a modern oil paint is quite a bit more advanced than what they could do then.

They also had a significant disadvantage in pigment availability. Chances are that there's a whole lot of modern, synthetic pigments among the colors you use regularly. Pyrrole Red is from 1974, for example.

We know that painters were well aware of things like how many good, natural pigments get different outcomes when diluted (go see what happens as you thin ultramarine), so it's not as if they had no technoology. But something like mica vs aluminum vs just gold leaf is a budgetary issue, both today and back then. You will find that good metallics are more expensive and avoid mica. But for an important statue, I suspect they'd take fewer cost cutting shortcuts, just like we can tell in renaissance and medieval art that got to us in relatively good shape. This is the kind of thing some people spend their lives studying.

kijinlast Thursday at 3:09 PM

They probably used whatever paint was closest in chemical composition to the residue they found on the statue.

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