NTO/TGN Green Paint Formula Update

My earlier purchase of most of the Model Flex green paints available at Discount Model Trains confirmed what I had suspected, that the Katy Green would be the best starting point to begin the matching process.  

Painted swatches from all of the greens revealed that ALL of them were darker than the green on my Floquil painted locomotives.  This meant that the first strategy would be to introduce metered amounts of white to the closest color--Katy Green.  I would use a clear plastic paint dropper to add the drops of white paint.

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I found a sheet of Evergreen Styrene Plastic to use as my test bed to create color swatches.  Using masking tape in a grid pattern each color swatch had a roughly equal area on the Styrene sheet.

The first four test swatches had 3, 9, 18, and 27 drops of white added respectively.  These were all very dark and had little visible variance.

The next four test swatches had 41, 50, 60, and 70 drops of white added respectively.  The color pattern was moving in the right direction but was not quite where it needed to be.  The final four swatches had 85, 100, 115, and 130 drops of white added with the 130 swatch being very close to the green on T&GN SD60M 2493 used as the control in this process.

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Given that each swatch painted depleted some of the green from the bottle, changing the drop/bottle ratio as white is added I suspect that an initial application of 150 drops of white paint to a new/full bottle of Katy Green paint will yield the correct color.

150 drops is right at 7 ml of fluid so the new formula for TGN/NTO green is 7 ml of Model Flex 16-02 Reefer White added to 1 oz (30 ml) bottle of Model Flex16-80 Katy Green. 

Now I need to master painting with this new paint.  The challenge with the quick drying paint is to keep it from drying in the airbrush before painting of a model is complete!  We will see...

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Model Flex Paint Matching

Chris