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cross-posted from: https://tabletop.place/post/2033
Recently been painting up Forest Dragon's Warmaster miniatures scaled to 15mm for custom scaled Frostgrave and Oathmark, and wanted to try out Army Painter's new 2.0 speedpaints, and I've been pleasantly surprised by the results! They dry a bit faster than I'd like, to the point of drying on-brush, but other than that, no complaints.
Still needs basing!
Looks great!
How do you like the army painter speed paints? Do you have experience with the citadel contrast or vallejo xpress paints, how do they compare?
Honestly, I wasn't impressed by the first round of speed paints, the original formula, because they had a tendency to smear and reactivate. This second round though, I'm very happy with. The 2.0 formula completely fixed the reactivation and slow drying issue, but as a result, the paint dries extremely fast. For 15mm, since you're using much less paint, this does mean that you get little working time and have to be generous with your amount of paint, but very careful in application (so pooling goes where you want it to go).
Compared to contrast paints, which have been my go-to, its hard to pick one over the other. I really like the consistency of the AP 2.0 paints. They flow well, and more importantly, all the paints I've tried flow the same as one another. The paints also dry more consistently, and streak much less. Citadel contrast paints, however, probably have better, well, contrast, and some colors, like skeleton hode, create much more unique color shifts from recesses to highlights; AP2.0 pallid bone or bony matter, for instance, feel more translucent and the colour shift more one-tone.
In general AP2.0 is more translucent though, and it takes multiple coats mucn better, and you need multiple coats more often. As a result, their paints also doesn't separate nearly as bad as Citadel contrast paints, which have a habit of completely separating in only a few days of being unused.
Altogether, I prefer some handful of colors from Citadel and the options for more advanced painting methods and styles, and I prefer a lot of the "just sit down and paint" usability of AP2.0, not to mention the lower cost and color selection. If someone told me to pick only one to suggest to a newcomer that wants a lot of colors to start with, I'd probably recommend the AP2.0 mega or complete set over any Citadel starter packs, but my real recommendation is to experiment with one or two of the AP2.0 paints, and see if your painting style fits the worktime and scale limitations.
If you're a more advanced painter, you'd likely want to use Citadel contrast and more "normal" paints because of how limiting AP2.0 can be, even if the results out of the box are very, very good. Better yet, use both in different circumstances when one works better than the other!
Thanks, that's very helpful! I quite enjoy having the contrast paints available to me (been painting for years off and on) and I heard the same things about the original AP speedpaints that you're saying. I have a bunch of both vallejo and citadel contrasts and I like them both, but they're quite different. Was just wondering if adding some AP speedpaints would be worth it. Though it sounds like they might not be for me. I particularly like to use the contrast paints for wet blending, but if they dry so quickly that doesn't sound like it'd be a good fit.
Thanks!
That looks fantastic, really nice work!
Thank you! I'm still debating how I'd like to base these guys since they're a bit "built up", and they definitely need a dry brushing, but good paints do heavy lifting!
The detail on miniatures and tidy lines is always so impressive to me. I needed my glasses to see it all on my phone. Do you have to use like a magnifying glass while you work?
Most miniature painters I know usually go without, at least with 28mm miniatures. I've usually stuck with that scale due to accessibility, it's just way more common, but I've fallen in love with the cost and space savings of 15mm, and the board feels much bigger when you play to boot.
With this scale, and 10mm, I always use a set of magnifying glasses with a light and flip-up lenses. They came with both headband and glasses-like adapters but as I wear glasses, I stick with the headband. They've been honestly one of my best purchases for painting and I even find myself using them with 28mm work as well!
Those would make it so much easier! A worthwhile investment for sure.
That's a cute sculpt and you painted it really well!
And honestly it looks like it's standing on a dungeon floor already, so I don't feel it needs basing like most models do.
My biggest bother is that the resin base the model has built-in resists sticking to green-stuff, so the seams between the two are fairly large. I'd like to mask it with some flocking of some kind, but I also do generally like clean bases and I tend to paint to a "tabletop ready" standard rather than anything fancy. Or maybe the seams aren't that bad, who knows!
It just futhers the ruins feel to me, but I can get why it might not do it for you.