New GW paints

Don't know if it's of any use, but I've ust been down to my local GW where I got a look at the new WD which has a stage by stage guide to painting Saurus using the new paints.
From what I can remember, it started with a base of Stegadon Scale Green, followed with a wash of Coelia Greenshade, then Sotek Green and highlights of Temple Guard Blue, but I forget what else was there :S so probably no use anyway!

Anyway, new paint wise I haven't found any issue with using the layers as a basecoat. I'm not a fan of the Agrax shade so I'll be continuing to use my Vallejo Sepia (my favourite thing ever) and Umber shades.

In the main though I'm a big fan of the coverage and so on of the new paints.Now I'll concede I may have been lucky with the paints I've had so far, given what other people have said, but I picked up some awful paints from the old range so I was very wary of GW paints before this. Now I'm impressed.

 

Makes sense... GW wants to be "The Hobby" all on its own, they will have a prescribed way of painting and they will make it relatively simple to help their target audience of kids to be able to paint something that looks half decent to try to keep them in for a couple months longer.

I've been moving away from GW paints lately anyway, so good luck to them.

 

I really don't like the way GW advertise their paints. Sure, it is a lot easier for kids to paint when they have all the colours available without having to mix them; but the kids won't learn anything about colour theory. I haven't got the chance to look through the GW paint range, but I'm sure you can make most of the colours by mixing 2 or more primary colours together.

Also, $870 for about 1.7 L of paint? No thanks.

 

Do they have metallics? Because I really liked GW's older ones (Mithril Silver -> Burnished Gold -> Delvan Mud -> Ogryn Flesh makes a ballin gold), and P3's are craaaaaaap. It's like…how? How are they so bad?

 

I'm interested, what sort of pots would you guys use when mixing your own paints? I really need some mixing pots, partly for mixing and partly to transfer some old paints that I've mixed and don't want them drying out on me.

Back when I started the hobby at about 9 years old and couldn't afford paints, I stuck to few paints and went mostly with primary colours to mix my own... I learnt almost nothing about colour theory and mostly got what I wanted through trial and error (lots of it) from what we learnt in primary school art classes You don't learn colour theory by having few paint options, you learn it because someone teaches you and/or you research it yourself (back when I started painting, not sure, might have just gotten the internet for the first time, but it wasn't much use for researching things like that to me at least).

Some colours are really tricky to mix like you might want as well, a lot of useful colours for hobbyists tend to be brown or muddy colours and aren't really that easy to mix or if you do mix them, aren't all that repeatable and would require mixing pot-fulls of it so you can actually match the colour from one model to the next. I gave up mixing paints that I can buy out of the pot after realising that half the time I was spending painting was being spent on the palette, either mixing a paint or maintaining the consistency as the paint dried on the palette, which is why I appreciate the large range of paints GW have.

Also, on the quantity of paint... I'd be happy it GW charged less for more, maybe 15 or 18ml pots would be nice, but personally I almost never "run out" of paint. In the 15 or so years I've been painting, I've legitimately "run out" of maybe half a dozen pots of paint (excluding washes). It's only when its a base colour like black or scorched brown or a primary colour for an army, and even then it'd have to be a pretty big army for me to use the whole 12ml.

By far the main reason I have to rebuy the same paints it's because the damned things dry out. I wish I'd bought more GW paints back in the mid 90s to stock up on the old tins that never dry out, it would have saved me more money than anything else.

I'd like to give mixing my own paints from artstore acrylics a shot some time, but yeah, would need to have some good pots to mix them in because I have no interest in remixing them and spending lots of time trying to get the constitency right every time I was painting.

 

Pots? Artist acrylic paints come in tubes. I have around 20 colours which I can use to mix to get whichever colour I want. In terms of colour consistency, I don't really have much problems with recreating a certain colour, just practice. Besides, I think having slightly different green for each of my saurus warriors is kinda neat. In terms of colour choices, artist acrylics have a much wider range of paint, and also special effects paints as well.

Also, you can make washes and the like very easily. People at GW like to tell you that washes are not just watered down paint; but guess what? It is. I don't know why the GW washes smell so bad, but my guess is they use alcohol so that it dries faster (which makes sense since my home-made washes don't dry nearly as fast).

I buy 75ml acrylic tubes for $10 average. Some colours are a lot more expensive ($25 per 75ml) because they're special effects ones but still cheaper than GW paints.

 

I know they come in tubes, my point was I don't want to mix them each time, hence I want pots so I can squeeze out the correct proportions into a pot then put in some water to get a good consistency and just mix it up so I can use it later

$10-$25 for 75ml of paint sounds nice, but then even if you are just working from primary colours you're probably still looking at half a dozen paints, so $60+. Which would have bought you 15 or so GW paints, which might only be 12ml each, but like I said above, I don't think I've ever used more than 12ml of a paint on a single army.

GW use a medium for their washes. It's not water. Their washes are much better behaved than watered down paints, they flow better into recesses and are more easily manipulated to where you want them. Both the old inks from the 90s and the newer washes give results much different to that from just watering down paints depending on the type of texture you apply it to on the model. If you apply a heavily watered down wash-like paint over a spray primed model, you'll often get the exact opposite effect you want, where a wash attracts to the crevices a watered down paint will tend to attract to where ever the primer is applied thickest, which is the raised surfaces.

There's a whole range of acrylic thinning and glaze mediums you can buy, almost every company that makes hobbyist acrylics also make thinning agents which might give you something akin to a GW wash, no idea which ones will give you that result. One person reviewing the new paints commented that the new Lahmian Medium is basically the medium GW use to make their washes, and in their opinion works better than a lot of other mediums... except it costs a fortune

 

I see what you mean with the mixing. Each to their own I guess.

Nope. A pot of GW paint costs "only" $6 here in Sydney. So for $60 I'd only get 10.

 

Ah ok, I assumed since you gave no denomination you were in the US so I used US pricing

But yeah, the killer for me with GW paints is the damned things dry out in as little as a few months to a couple of years. If I didn't have to rebuy paints because the old ones dried out, it would have saved me a lot of money. The actual paint cost itself isn't too bad given 12ml really goes quite a long way on miniatures. Where it starts to get expensive is if you try and paint terrain with it and also the colours you basecoat/undercoat with, though I haven't undercoated with anything but spray paint for years. Back when I'd undercoat things by hand to save money I went through a few pots of black.

That's partly why I want to find some good pots that I can both mix paint in and also transfer some of my old GW paints. Soon I'll be travelling overseas for a year and won't be using my paints, I know half of them are gonna be dry by the time I get back. It'd be nice to store some of them in pots where they won't go bad.

 

Tonight I started basing my Orc and Goblin army with the new texture paint. 1 pot of paint has gotten me through 12 Arrer Boyz and 30 Night Goblins, so a decent couple of regiments from 1 pot, but not quite as much as I was expecting. There is still some paint in the pot, but it's damned near impossible to reach it, it's stuck under the bit where the cap attaches to the pot, can't get a brush in there. There's probably a few more models worth of paint in it, so when I start doing my next regiment I might use a sculpting tool and scrape it out or something.

Disappointingly, you can't actually remove the cap from the pot, or at least I haven't managed to, it doesn't want to twist off and I haven't been able to pry it off (I'm sure I can if I try hard enough, but trying to not destroy the pot so I can reuse it later).

Also I'm applying it pretty darned thick, the ones I've seen in my local GW store they aren't applying it nearly as thick as my models, and it'd probably last twice as long, but I don't think theirs looks as good as mine.

 

What do you think of the texture paint vs sand and glue?

 

I think it looks as good or better than sand if you just compare it to plain sand, though if you throw in a few tiny pebbles on the base with the sand, I think the sand looks better. The texture paint, applying it the way I described earlier, gives a very similar look to a few different grain sizes of sand mixed together.

It's definitely a lot more expensive than sand. I said I was going to look for some of the Vallejo stuff to compare as it's a LOT cheaper than GW stuff, but the shop I normally buy Vallejo stuff from closed down a few weeks ago and I haven't had time to find somewhere else that sells it. It'll probably take 4 or so pots to do my entire Orc army which is a bit over 100 models, some of which are cavalry and chariots.

I think it saves maybe a couple of minutes per model compared to sand, though others might disagree with me on that. Applying sand doesn't really take long to do and probably slightly quicker than applying a texture paint, but I find it takes a few minutes per model to actually basecoat the sand, especially if the model is already glued down as you have to get the paint between the grains of sand without accidently going over your model. The texture paint saves you time on that step, which may or may not be worth the huge price premium for it.

 

The cost is monumental though. I'm thinking of getting a thick artist's paint and mix it with some river sand (river sand has inconsistent grain size whereas beach sand has consistent grain sand) and I think you'll get a very similar effect to texture paint.

 

Well, as I said earlier in the thread, the cost is high-ish, but if it takes 4 pots to paint an army, that's $24AUD... $24AUD to paint an army that cost me over $400AUD all up to put together despite buying a lot of it 2nd hand or on special (I'm thinking of my Orcs and Goblins).

EDIT: Actually $20 AUD, GW themselves sell it for $6 but I can get it for $5 from my local hobby store

 

I bought a pot of Balthasar gold and am loving it. I usually hate painting gold because of the sheer number of layers required to get a solid coat, but this works great. A single coat of Balthasar followed by an Agrax wash and then highlight with Shining Gold looks good and is pretty quick to do.