There are so many paint brands, it’s can be hard to know where to start. Why should you go with The Army Painter, a brand designed with a ‘playing’ mentality?
Paint brands all come with their pros and cons. As such, it’s important to figure out what you are looking for in paints before you look for what each brand has to offer.
Why Buy The Army Painter Paints?
The Army Painter has a very unique approach to painting, with products made to simplify as much as possible your process and get your models painted in record time. They are a boardgame and roleplaying game’s favorite for this reason.
Of course, their paints are not limited to that use.
Pros
The biggest pro of The Army Painter is their color matching between ranges. If you use their Alien Purple colored primer shaker can, both the airbrush Alien Purple and regular Alien Purple will be the exact color.
In this regards, it is the best in the business by far.
Another great tool from The Army Painter is the Quickshade. This is really the fastest way to get models from the box to the table fully painted.
While it is build around the dipping technique, applying it with a brush yields great results in about the same time.
The Army Painters’ range is filled with amazing bright colors. If Citadel was too grimdark for you, chances are that The Army Painter is what you’re looking for.
This is also great because the aforementioned Quickshade dulls down most colors, so gettign them extra bright to begin with truly helps.
Cons
The biggest drawback of The Army Painter is the paint’s overall consistency. It is very much on the thick side, and tends to separate easily. This means you have to shake it like it’s your day job or it comes out wrong.
The thickness is not a huge drawback, but it does affect the opacity, as you need to thin the paints significantly to get them to the right consistency. This is frustrating when you are looking for base coats out of their regular paints.
Besides Shining Silver, the metallics are another weak point of the range. They have a limited selection, and those are neither great at covering nor blending down.
I have not tried their most recent addition, colored metallics, yet.
While not a huge ‘con’ the starter sets and bundles are nothing impressive. They usually don’t offer a significant discount and the color choice is more a taster’s pack than colors that you’ll be using on the regular.
Speed Paints
The speed paints range is a great contrast alternative, but does come with its own set of pros and cons.
One one hand, the texture and consistency of the speed paints is very great straight our of the bottle, and they offer a nice range of colors.
However, the paints need a full 24 hours to dry, and then a coat of varnish. Otherwise, they will re-activate with water (and water-based paints, like their entire range, for example)
The Best The Army Painter Paints
Here are some of my favorite colors from The Army Painter if you find you want to add some to your palette.
- Color Primer & the matching color. Always buy the pot with the can, whatever color you are getting for your army.
- Shining Silver
- Chaotic Red (very dark red)
- Soft Tone Ink (more potent than Seraphim Sepia, but in the same tone)
- Matt White (arguably the best straight white paint)
- Matt Black (my favorite black paint)
- Fur Brown (Lighter than Doombull Brown, red-orange brown color)
- Toxic Mist (light turquoise)
- Kraken Skin (light greenish turquoise)