Tips for Starting Warhammer 40k: Painting Basics 2

So, you have your miniatures all assembled and primed. What to do next? Well, assuming you have some brushes, it's time to talk about paints.

Paints

Starting out buying paints can be a little overwhelming at first. There are so many brands (GW, Reaper, Vallejo, Army Painter) and hundred upon hundreds of colors. Where do you start?

There is no "best paint brand" out there. It really depends on what you're painting and also your own preferences. I mostly use GW (Games Workshop) paints, with a couple Vallejo Game Color and general craft paints mixed in. Many beginners enjoy GW paints because they are specifically tailored to painting citadel miniatures, so you need to do very minimal or no paint mixing, which can be extremely difficult for people just starting out. However, the new GW line has hundreds of colors, which total to about $450. For most of us this is not a realistic option.

Instead, a better option is to buy paints as you need them. This is sometimes more difficult, as won't have the colors you need right away. But when you are starting out, you should only need about 10 colors or so if you choose them well. As I stated in an earlier post, the GW starting paint set is great for this, although you may need to buy some additional colors.

If I were to recommend one paint brand over all others, it would be Vallejo (Game Color and Model Color are similar, I'm not 100% sure on the difference, but I prefer the former). They come in dropper bottles, which makes mixing paints easier (you can count the drops of each color used to recreate later) and they don't dry out. I don't think they have a starter paint set, so you should just buy the paints you really need.

When you have both your army and your color scheme chosen, you need to chose the paints you are going to use. Typically you will need a base color, a shade, a highlight, and a couple various other colors. For an example, I will chose the Dark Angels. Looking at the  Dark Angels color scheme, I can see that the colors are mostly dark green with some red parts as well. I chose a base of a pretty dark green (I used Caliban Green), a shade of Nuln Oil (a GW wash), a highlight of Moot Green mixed with a little bit of Caliban Green, and a few other colors, like Leadbelcher for the metal and Blood Red (now Evil Sunz Scarlet) for some other parts. I completed my entire model with just a few colors. You will need a few more colors to paint more complex models, but you can see the process here. The goal is to spend as little money on paints as possible, because the cost can really add up. 

---Games Workshop Paints---

Even after exploring all the other paint brands out there, many painters chose to use GW paints. There is nothing wrong with that, they are good paints. However, the new GW paint set  can be awfully deceiving. There are 144 paints, and many of them look nearly identical. Unless you have money coming out all bodily orifices, you can't afford to buy them all. Here are a few tips for the new GW paint line:

-   The "Basecoat" and "Layer" paints are almost identical in everything that counts. They can be used interchangeably. 

-    Instead of buying all 4 GW glazes, you can buy a "Glaze Medium", and make a glaze using any of your existing colors.

-    The GW washes are good. You should get at least the brown and black ones (Nuln Oil and Agrax Earthshade).Washes in general are almost a necessity in your painting arsenal (I will go over what they are, and how to use them, soon).

-     You don't have buy the whole range of one color ( i.e. all the shades of green, there are like 15 of them). You can buy the darkest and lightest of them and mix, like Moot Green and Caliban Green. I use those for just about all my greens, and I can add a little blue to make shades of turquoise.

-      The "Dry" paints can be avoided. They are meant for drybrushing, a technique I will go over soon. They are pretty much just lighter colors of some of the common layer paints. 

-      I haven't tried any of the Citadel "Texture" paints, nor have I heard bad or good things about them. I will do my research and get back to you.

Hopefully, with these tips, you can cut down your paint spending as much as possible. It's usually a good idea to know that you need a specific paint before going and buying it.

---Other Paint Brands---

There are lots of paint brands out there that I haven't tried. If you want to try a brand, don't be afraid. GW and Vallejo aren't necessarily the best, they just happen to be the ones I use and have access to. Sometimes, when you need a very large amount of some color, like for painting tanks, using a cheaper craft paint is the way to go. I usually don't like using certain craft paints, as mine sometimes don't thin well and leave streaks, but I'm sure others are good. Don't be afraid to branch out, but test them out on some practice miniatures first.


Overview: Buy the paints you know you will need. When in doubt, just buy Vallejo paints. I think they're awesome, and I don't even get paid to say that. You can always mix the paints you need using the ones you have, but if you are going to be using one A LOT, just buy that color. Make sure you have a basecoat color, a highlight and a shade color for you army (these are the ones you don't want to have to mix, because you don't want half your army to look one shade off from the other half). Test out paints from lots of brands of some test miniatures.