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I think so, yes. Contrast was engineered to flow on your model in a way that the slapchop process interferes with (theres a reason GW spent all that time trying to formulate specific contrast primers before releasing the paint into the world). The paint you're drybrushing with and the drybrush process itself adds a lot of "tooth" to the surface of the model which causes it to pool in ways that are less than ideal and different from intended. You don't get the full contrast effect as a result and much of the shading and highlighting that you do get as a result of slapchop are in fact coming from the grisaille underpainting rather than the contrast effect itself.

Thats on top of the fact that contrast was designed to deliver bright vibrant colors while doing its thing, rather than leaving a majority of the model only slightly discolored as is the case with washes or inks. Slapchop results in your colors being dulled out and muted and nowhere near as bright or vibrant as if you had just painted it straight over the intended primers.

Basically, you're spending a lot of money to use contrast paint, because it was developed and intended to do something a bit differently from what slapchop needs, and as a result you're losing out on the primary features of that contrast paint and getting suboptimal results from it. You could get the same effect from speedpaint or some of the other alternative "single layer" paints on the market which try to mimic contrasts capabilities, but only cost like half as much.

I'm really torn on these. Going by reviews so far, they seem to be really good, and a step up from their current paints.., but I got burnt by jumping in on the initial Speedpaint release, so I'm hesitant to buy into the hype again.

I'm watching with great interest. As usual, their "Factory Team" loves them and what can be seen looks good, but that's nothing new.

Need a more nuanced or distanced review from someone like Garfy. (Stahly too, but Garfy is more fun to mess with)

No matter how much I harass him on Twitter, his recommendations haven't led me astray yet.

chaos0xomega wrote:
Army Painter paint seems to be one of the easiest to get ahold of, at least around me. Almost every store that carries miniatures paints seems to carry army painter in addition to GW/citadel. Vallejo is the other very common one.

I know some people swear by AP, but I don't understand why. My own experience with them is one of complete inconsistency - one bottle is just fine (and only fine, not great, but usable), the next is impossbly thin, another incredibly thick. No amount of shaking, mixing, thinning, etc. will fix them or get them working the same way. I even have had issues with two paints of supposedly identical color are actually entirely different colors nowhere even close to comparable (i.e. a paint that is supposed to be a medium green - one bottle comes out more like a light green, the other comes out brown. Threw a mixing ball in there with some thinner and let them ride on my vortex mixer, still wouldn't mix to a different color).

Then theres the original speedpaint, which was a product that was fundamentally flawed and virtually unusable as intended due to the reactivation effect, which they tried to convince customers was an intentional feature, only to then finally acknowledge that it was a product defect which they couldn't correct and that they needed to discontinue the product to try to correct it. (which they did, ironically though people then complained that the lack of reactivation made them worse than the originals).

YMMV, but I have some of the gen 1 Speedpaints and didn't have any reactivation issues after using Contrast medium to thin them. I'd still rate Contrast as the top overall line of that product type, but Speedpaints are my second favorite. The AP air paints are also very good, as I said previously. This is coming from someone who feels that their regular line of paint can be like painting with pudding, mind you. Makes me wonder if they applied some lessons/knowledge from their air line to this new regular line.

The Metallics and Effects paints look promising.

I’ve recently started using Army Painter, and I’ve not had any problems.

Picked them up because my FLGS because they were in stock and the Citadel equivalents weren’t.

Haven’t had any issues with them. But then, I am painting epic, so kind of hard to make a proper judgement on such teensy models.

Dropper Pots are nice though.

Just leaving this little teaser here, complete review of all 216 colours coming on Saturday

More reviews are coming in. I really liked Vince's review, who echoes some of my findings:




And here is mine, worked really hard on this, my longest video ever!

Glad to see that the new AP paints are very good. I expected they would be good after all the work they said they put into them, but I also didn't expect they would be the new best paint.
Unfortunately, I just won't be buying any as I already have Pro Acryl, Scale75, Kimera, GW's Contrast paint, and Vallejo's metals, so I need a new paint range like I need a hole in the head.

Both very good reviews from 2 people that painters should listen to.

Thanks for your work Stahly.

A review from Juan Hidalgo...

It’s finally here! Now I’m trying to figure out which racks I need to keep and which are getting replaced. I assume the Speed Paint 2.0 is sticking around. What about the airbrush paint line? Is that getting replaced or are those still remaining? Is it only the white capped normal paint stuff that’s going away?

Yes, the airbrush line will stay, the old Warpaints range will be discontinued.

Btw, single Warpaint Fanatic paints will be out this Saturday. For those who don't want to go by product photos alone, I made a professional reproduction of all 216 colours, hand-painted over plasticard.



You can download the chart in my Patreon shop, and I also charts for a number of other paint ranges such as Citadel, Vallejo Game Color, AK, and more, which you can use to cross-reference colours across ranges: https://www.patreon.com/stahlytaleofpainters/shop