I'm on somewhat of a budget and for 2 days, I've been pricing out paints from everyone I can find on the internet. I've priced Vallejo, P3, Reaper, Citadel, Cote'd, Testor(desperate!), Windsor and Newton paints, and a new paint product(maybe not new as on the market but new to me) from Army Painter called Warpaints. Cheesie name, I know lol.
Seeing that I live in the USA, Cote'd is out of the question as I'll pay more for shipping than I would on the paints themselves. I've Priced P3 paints and Reaper paints as being about the same price ($2.79/15mL dropper) with P3 being cheaper if I buy bundle ($2.49/6 compared to Reaper selling $2.66/triad). I would love to buy P3 paints in bundle but seeing they only come in Warmachine name bundles with like 3 greens or 3 reds or what not, you dont get variety. I figure if you buy in bundle you should save overall right? Keyword: SHOULD. Reaper paints are 'Merican made so figure it wouldnt be so bad to somewhat boost up the economy lol. Moving on..
Vallejo Paints I can get for about $2.68/17mL dropper if I get a bundle of 16 ($2.75/dropper) and their 16 dropper bundles are awesome as far as range of paints! This would be the best deal even though P3 would be cheaper by .21cents, the range of paint I would get wouldnt be near as vast as Vallejo could give me. Plus Vallejo give me another 2mL of paint for .21cents! thats a total of 32mL more paint (more than 2 P3 bottles) for just $3 more. Thats a free bottle for the most part? Then you have Citadel, which is the reason why I'm looking for other paints. Not that Citadel have terrible paints by any means, I'm just not going to pay over $3 for a 12mL pot! Not when there are other paint companies out there that are pretty much doing the same thing for cheaper.
Then I stumbled upon Army Painter Warpaints when I was searching on thewarstore.com. I'm assuming it is their own line of paints? They seem to have a great deal of paints too with an "exact" match color scheme to their spray paints. They were by far the more echonomical choice as they were $2.49/18mL dropper or more like $2.29/bundle. at 18mL, they hold 50% more paint than Citadel paint pots, 25% more paint than P3 or Reaper, and a whole mL more paint than Vallejo...and costs 31% less than Citadel paints. The problem I saw was I couldnt find any reviews worth standing when it came to them. I saw 1 bad review and like 4 mediocre reviews that could very well have been given by the company itself. I searched here and didnt have anything concrete either.
I'm hoping someone has bought some of their paints, other than primers (i bought their white primer as i am using Citadel Chaos Black primer), and can give me their insight on what they think, especially someone who has used a few different kinds of paints before. I'm pretty much a noob when it comes to model painting, but i'm not a noob when it comes to painting in general.
*I didnt factor in Windsor and Newton because I'm not even sure how I could take a tube of their Acrylic paints and mix them with the right amount of water or acetone to thin them out to proper use? Or are those the kinds of paints where you use a small amount at a time in your pallet and add thinning agents as you go? I'd like to convert them to dropper bottles if i could figure out the ratios since I can get a huge tube for like $2.25 at Hobby Lobby.
I went ahead and took a leap of faith and bought Army Painters Warpaint battle bundle or whatever its called. The $99 bundle that comes with 36 paints, 6 brushes, and some other stuff. I hope the Warpaints arent going to dissapoint. I'll know by this weekend(hopefully) as they are being shipped via ground(i bought the white primer in spray so no flying).
To make things even more easy for me, I thought I'd bother you with another click of the mouse and put a Poll up to see what paints you choose. Bang for the buck that isnt too crappy i.e. Testor paints will not be polled lol. I'm sure P3 or Reaper paints are pretty high quality but seeing that my Fiance gave me $100 to spend on paints, what would be the best way to spend $100 if you are starting from scratch (i have the brushes and stuff like that. Purely paint).
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