I'm with you! I prefer oil-based paints for all the usual reasons. I used to use Floquil exclusively. There's never been a better modeling paint before or since they quit making it because the ninnies were afraid to use it since it "smelled dangerous." I never use those tiny bottles of enamel from Testor's, Vallejo, or Tamiya, etc. I've used Humbrol and it's good stuff, but I don't bother with it anymore either. Primarily, it's about the expense of any of these "modeling" paints. After Floquil went south, and I'd used up my stash (which dried up in the bottle over the years,) I began using Grumbacher and Windsor and Newton artist's oils in the tubes. I condition the "toothpaste" paint with acetone, mineral spirits, turpentine, linseed oil, flattener, and Japan drier as suits my fancy at the moment. I mix up my own small bottles as needed and keep track of my color recipes as I go along. I mix whatever color I need from primary red, blue, and yellow, raw umber, and black and white. (I use the raw umber and/or black to mute the colors to achieve a scale viewing distance color. I always buy the highest quality paint I can, meaning the highest and finese pigment content I can find.
I'm not knocking the small, bottled paints. Their primary value is in railroad and military armor modeling because some can very accurately offer exact colors to match prototype railcars and engines and military vehicles. If I were modeling a 1943 German tank, I'd just go out and buy a bottle of "1943 Panzer grey" or whatever. With ship models, there is generally a very limited palette that anybody needs to work with. In practice, in many naval applications, only white paint (or sometimes just whiting, linseed oil, and turpentine) and pine tar would be issued as stores with it being left up to the ship's crew to mix their own paint and add coloring pigment if they wished. At times, the captain would dig into his own pocket for the price of the pigment. Therefore, exact colors are one thing ship modelers don't have to lose much sleep over.
