Dark Rose MC745

A muted pink without the sweetness

Dark pink belongs among the shades a modeler reaches for rarely, and which he nonetheless misses at exactly the moment they are needed. This is not the bright pink of toys but a muted tone shifted slightly toward gray, of the kind that arises when a red fabric fades in the sun for years or when a well-supplied spot shows through under the skin. It is precisely that mutedness that makes the shade usable even where a pure pink would give away at once that it came out of a bottle.

Where to use it

On figures it serves to deepen lips, the outer ears and the knuckles of fingers, that is the places where the skin is thinner. In a diorama it suits faded tarpaulins, blankets, embroidery and canvas awnings, or the petals of flowers. It also behaves interestingly as an intermediate step between brown and red when building rust, where a warm transitional tone is otherwise missing.

Properties and working with the paint

Model Color is a brush line with a finely ground pigment and a matte finish; it comes in a 17 ml dropper bottle. The shade is fairly saturated, but the covering power of pink pigments tends to be lower, so reckon on two thin coats instead of one heavy one. Heavily thinned it serves as a glaze with which a finished skin tone can be warmed up without losing the earlier transitions. Mixing it with ocher shifts the tone toward apricot, while a drop of gray knocks it down into ashen.

A small point in closing

Shades outside the main military palette are usually the slowest to be used up in a workshop, yet they cannot be substituted. It pays to keep them closed and away from heat, because an acrylic binder suffers from drying out in the neck rather than from aging inside the bottle.