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I wish them the best, mainly so I don't have to listen to the stories of "back in my day, people loved Vallejo surface primer..."

 legionaires wrote:
I wish them the best, mainly so I don't have to listen to the stories of "back in my day, people loved Vallejo surface primer..."

Oh geez I hadn't even considered the option of their primer going to gak

 lord_blackfang wrote:

 legionaires wrote:
I wish them the best, mainly so I don't have to listen to the stories of "back in my day, people loved Vallejo surface primer..."

Oh geez I hadn't even considered the option of their primer going to gak

That was a joke, ever Vallejo surface primer I have ever used has been trash. I would wipe off in few hours after drying.

I wonder what this means for AK Interactive? AFAIK they are at least partially owned by Vallejo..

As for Vallejo Surface Primer, meh. I bet Mr Surfacer Primers are superior to them in every way

 legionaires wrote:
That was a joke, ever Vallejo surface primer I have ever used has been trash. I would wipe off in few hours after drying.

I don't want to deny your experiences but that's very strange. I've been using nothing but their Polyurethane primer for 10+ years. It is basically a spray-on condom, it doesn't rub, if anything, it tears and peels. Do they sell something else in the States?

 legionaires wrote:

 lord_blackfang wrote:

 legionaires wrote:
I wish them the best, mainly so I don't have to listen to the stories of "back in my day, people loved Vallejo surface primer..."

Oh geez I hadn't even considered the option of their primer going to gak

That was a joke, ever Vallejo surface primer I have ever used has been trash. I would wipe off in few hours after drying.

This was exactly my experience.

I tried every solution that was put to me by helpful people online, nothing improved the adhesion of the primer. I tried three shades of Vallejo primer, all of them were dogshit.

 lord_blackfang wrote:

 legionaires wrote:
That was a joke, ever Vallejo surface primer I have ever used has been trash. I would wipe off in few hours after drying.

I don't want to deny your experiences but that's very strange. I've been using nothing but their Polyurethane primer for 10+ years. It is basically a spray-on condom, it doesn't rub, if anything, it tears and peels. Do they sell something else in the States?

No. I'm in the US and completely agree with your assessment. Been using it for years -- white, grey, black, red-brown, black gloss, etc. -- without any issues. I see comments like those sometimes, though. Clearly there's something different about the process for those folks that's making a difference with the result. Multiple thin layers and an overnight cure do the trick for me. Or maybe it's the expectations? It isn't a rock-hard surface. If you're going to dig your nail into it with force, sure, you can probably scratch it off. If you want something that cures extra-tough, then use auto primer. Which isn't as good for miniature painting because it tends to obscure details more IMO, but it'll be tough.



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 OrlandotheTechnicoloured wrote:
Wow that's interesting, i've only ever seen their scale modeling/hobby stuff over here in the UK

I've known for years that they have those products, but I've never seen them in stores. That's the kind of thing that the new owners could help with.

 gorgon wrote:

 OrlandotheTechnicoloured wrote:
Wow that's interesting, i've only ever seen their scale modeling/hobby stuff over here in the UK

I've known for years that they have those products, but I've never seen them in stores. That's the kind of thing that the new owners could help with.

Would they be able to compete with Golden, Grumbacher and Liquitex (US) or Berol, Daler-Rowney, Reeves and Windsor Newton (UK)? I would imagine that much like us, those painting with acrylic paints already have their favorite brands.

If they do try to make headway into the artist acrylics market, they would likely have to position themselves as either a budget brand or a premium brand.

And, in the US at least, they might have a chance. Hobby Lobby already stocks their Model Color line, so that could be the "foot in the door" to get their artist paints into Hobby Lobby, as well. I was just at my local Hobby Lobby, and they had squat for artist paints. Not really any "good stuff", just the cheaper acrylics, especially in comparison to the Michaels that was in the same shopping center.

 gorgon wrote:


No. I'm in the US and completely agree with your assessment. Been using it for years -- white, grey, black, red-brown, black gloss, etc. -- without any issues. I see comments like those sometimes, though. Clearly there's something different about the process for those folks that's making a difference with the result. Multiple thin layers and an overnight cure do the trick for me. Or maybe it's the expectations? It isn't a rock-hard surface. If you're going to dig your nail into it with force, sure, you can probably scratch it off. If you want something that cures extra-tough, then use auto primer. Which isn't as good for miniature painting because it tends to obscure details more IMO, but it'll be tough.

So it was the brush on kind in the small dropper bottle. It my also be because I was living in Louisiana, so ultra high humidity and I wasn't trying to scratch it off, it would just puddle and pull away from the recesses as it dried and that was after multiple washings of the model. Then it would wipe off. Who knows why. I ended up switching to artist gesso until I got an airbrush.

 lord_blackfang wrote:

 legionaires wrote:
That was a joke, ever Vallejo surface primer I have ever used has been trash. I would wipe off in few hours after drying.

I don't want to deny your experiences but that's very strange. I've been using nothing but their Polyurethane primer for 10+ years. It is basically a spray-on condom, it doesn't rub, if anything, it tears and peels. Do they sell something else in the States?

I used it for a while and found it barely any better than using no primer at all. Unfortunately, it seems for primer to not suck, it needs horrible chemicals to bite into the plastic (e.g. lacquer primers are awesome).

Some people say they love it, so either the people who hate it aren't using it right, the people who love it have never tried any of the other options, or Vallejo are horribly inconsistent and it varies from bottle to bottle.

But the basic "Vallejo Model Color" range is still one of my favourites for high opacity paints. So I hope Vallejo can keep going on their merry way to keep those on shelves.

Ghaz wrote:Would they be able to compete with Golden, Grumbacher and Liquitex (US) or Berol, Daler-Rowney, Reeves and Windsor Newton (UK)? I would imagine that much like us, those painting with acrylic paints already have their favorite brands.

For traditional painters switching brands is less of an issue than for miniature painters. But it'd still be an uphill battle. People tend to stick with what works for them.

For miniature we tend to have dozens of bottles of various colours (and washes, contrast paints, metallics, and so on) while traditional painters tend to get a handful of paints and mix more. Of course, it's all relative to the individual but that a broad strokes comparison between the two types of painting. Even those who use more paints tend to not do it on the scale as miniature painters do so testing one tube of paint to see if it fits your needs and then buying a few more as needed. And on the miniature painting sides we have conventions like colour triads (base colours/highlights/shadows) for assembly line painting while triads in traditional painting/colour theory is a different thing.

Traditional painters sometimes even use a rather restricted palette and then mix the rest as needed (something that's done on miniatures more as a "party trick"). A prominent example of that would be the Zorn Palette (nice article, with a summary at the bottom) where only four colours are used. You mix the rest from those four if the spectrum they can provide you is enough. This tends to work better with artist grade paints than with hobby grade due to pigmentation being better/purer. They can mix greys easier (once they get the right complementary colours to cancel each other out) while hobby grade paints are focused on getting all kinds of specific, more unorthodox, hues so mixing them can end up more brownish even if the colour looked pure right out of the bottle.

This article shows what colours can be mixed with such a limited palette (right at the top):

https://www.jacksonsart.com/blog/2021/02/02/colour-mixing-exploring-the-zorn-palette/

Some stores even sell it as a set, like how GW once sold army specific paint sets:

https://www.naturalpigments.eu/zorn-palette.html

Wait. Is the Zorn Palette the missing puzzle piece that explains Blanche’s style?

Mario wrote:

Ghaz wrote:Would they be able to compete with Golden, Grumbacher and Liquitex (US) or Berol, Daler-Rowney, Reeves and Windsor Newton (UK)? I would imagine that much like us, those painting with acrylic paints already have their favorite brands.

For traditional painters switching brands is less of an issue than for miniature painters. But it'd still be an uphill battle. People tend to stick with what works for them.

For miniature we tend to have dozens of bottles of various colours (and washes, contrast paints, metallics, and so on) while traditional painters tend to get a handful of paints and mix more. Of course, it's all relative to the individual but that a broad strokes comparison between the two types of painting. Even those who use more paints tend to not do it on the scale as miniature painters do so testing one tube of paint to see if it fits your needs and then buying a few more as needed. And on the miniature painting sides we have conventions like colour triads (base colours/highlights/shadows) for assembly line painting while triads in traditional painting/colour theory is a different thing.

Traditional painters sometimes even use a rather restricted palette and then mix the rest as needed (something that's done on miniatures more as a "party trick"). A prominent example of that would be the Zorn Palette (nice article, with a summary at the bottom) where only four colours are used. You mix the rest from those four if the spectrum they can provide you is enough. This tends to work better with artist grade paints than with hobby grade due to pigmentation being better/purer. They can mix greys easier (once they get the right complementary colours to cancel each other out) while hobby grade paints are focused on getting all kinds of specific, more unorthodox, hues so mixing them can end up more brownish even if the colour looked pure right out of the bottle.

This article shows what colours can be mixed with such a limited palette (right at the top):

https://www.jacksonsart.com/blog/2021/02/02/colour-mixing-exploring-the-zorn-palette/

Some stores even sell it as a set, like how GW once sold army specific paint sets:

https://www.naturalpigments.eu/zorn-palette.html

Mixing paints make sense for art, where everything is a one off and you’re often trying to match a specific colour from reality, or to create a very specific effect. Miniature painting needs to be consistent and reliable across hundreds of individual pieces over a long* period of time, which is a very different requirement.

*Long, long, long, long, long periods of time…

We’ll hope for the best, but I’ve seen the dark side of these venture capital groups up close and personal. Remington Arms was publicly held as part of DuPont until the mid 90s, when DuPont sold out and the company went private.

Almost immediately, future availability of pensions were cancelled, and a minimum company contribution 401K put into its place. Years of bad business decisions and acquiring loads of debt chasing those decisions led to a final closure and bankruptcy sale of assets in 2020.

The name continues on in other hands, but a company that was in business over 200 years, one of the oldest in the US, and still making its original product, is now gone. It took venture capitalists only around twenty years to ruin it. Cerberus Capital Management was the primary guilty party. They are as sleazy as it gets. I worked for Remington almost ten years in that final period, as disclosure. Good luck, Vallejo. I fear you’ll need it.

 BobtheInquisitor wrote:
Wait. Is the Zorn Palette the missing puzzle piece that explains Blanche’s style?

I don't know if he ever directly mentioned it but I remember reading about some of his inspiration (or hearing about it in some interview[1]) and that might simply have been painters who used it extensively without actively calling it that (wikipedia hints at that a bit). And him following in their footsteps (those influences plus his own ideas) might not even necessitate him actively going for a Zorn palette and still end up at a similar mood.

It's also, for example, how a lot of authoritarian propaganda all over the world independently ends up with a strong black, white, and red colour scheme (one that 40K uses it for great effect). Those colours simply work for that type of messaging.

The Zorn palette is only named after him because his work was often constrained to it and he's a great example of it. It was done before him but he kinda became the banner bearer for it. Other painters might have ended up with a similar constrained palette if they wanted to go for a similar mood even if they didn't know of him or how/why he painted like this. In the end it's a minimal set of paints that includes just enough to paint anything (to some degree at least) and at the same time can depict a rather wide spectrum of human skin tones.

[1]: I know/remember that besides a bunch of historical painters, Vivienne Westwood's 70s punk phase was also a big inspiration for his work.

I do like Vallejo paints, and use quite a few of them (and Reaper paints, which are surprisingly good).

There is a cooking show on PBS that I like, America's Test Kitchen. They were bought by a VC group about 8 years ago. The ATK founder left the business to start his own and... so far so good. The VC updated/upgraded the work spaces -- and not on the cheap either -- and seems to have done a good job of growing the publishing side of the business without harming the other aspects of it. I mention this to show that not all VC purchases are bad. Vallejo may benefit.

ProA, among other things, according to the article is involved in a business for aeronautical parts and services. Not really synergetic with Vallejo.

Look on the bright side. Carl Icahn is not involved in this.