Paint for scenery

I mentioned in an earlier scenery post that I used Humbrol enamel 29 dark earth as the base coat for figure bases with Plaka yellow ochre straight from the jar and then mixed with increasing quantities of Vallejo white as dry bushed hi-lights.

When I started making the scenery shown on this blog, I wanted to use cheaper and higher volume alternatives. Yellow ochre and white were easy - I just bought relatively cheap DecoArt craft acrylic paint from Hobbycraft.

My first try at the dark earth replacement was a match pot of Homebase brown emulsion with various dark browns and greens mixed in to give a close match. That worked very well but was soon used up so I took the plunge and decided to use the Dulux colour matching system to buy a litre to an exact match. I painted a patch of Humbrol onto a sheet of card to use as a reference. Disappointingly the colour that came out (Beaver 08B25, which, oddly, does not feature on the Dulux website) proved not to be a very good match at all - too pale and grey. To compound my annoyance, Homebase insisted there were no returns allowed on mix to order paint.

Having spent the money and having no return option, I decided to try it anyway and to my surprise, once the thick dry-brushing of yellow ochre was done and the subsequent hi-lights, the finished effect was quite indistinguishable, to me, from the bases using Humbrol dark earth or the earlier scenery pieces with my hand-mixed match pot. 

Looking on the Dulux website, it looks as though there are a couple of better matches - Rich Praline 2 and Earth Glaze 1 but I guess any of the earthy medium-dark browns would work equally well.