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Are they meant to be used straight from the bottle? Do they need watering down?

You should probably add a little water as sometimes if you lay it on thick it can get streaky or chalky.

You should buy the whole set at Black Diamond! :3

Nah, but seriously, they are really good but you need to keep a few things in mind when you use them. Let me ramble:

One being that they are not game colors so they lack tooth. Two because they lack tooth they are easier to get some high quality blends. They dry more flat (not shiny), even the metalics. If you lay it on thick, you will see cracking from the top layer drying faster than the bottom. I love that the bottles have agitators already in them. Sometimes I think the agitators can plug up the opening. You really have to be sure to use a sealant, when you are done.

If you are thinking about using them, you might want to get a firm grasp on some advanced techniques and tools. (i.e. kolinsky sable brushes, wet pallets, glaze mediums, wet blending, feathering and lining.) Although, the results of simple dry brushing with this stuff is pretty amazing.

Bottom line, they are still acrylic paints, get them if you like the color they have. They will work much the same as others you have used. (Maybe a little better in my opinion. Or maybe on par with P3 just with a better pallet.)

You -can- use them straight from the bottle, if you really really want. They have a dropper, though, so you'll probably want to drip a bit onto a palette if you're doing more than fine detail work.

I've used them a couple times; they're thinner than GW paints, which makes me happy; depending on what I'd be doing I'd thin them a bit more anyway though. Also since you're not keeping the pot open all the time they won't dry out so fast.

One thing I really really like about them is the way the paints are matched up on the display. I've been mixing my own colors together for highlighting and whatnot, but I love how they have most of the shades arranged in dark/medium/light trios. And there are so many MORE shades (around 200 or so I think), so I wouldn't HAVE to mix my own colors together. I've already decided I'm going to switch to Reaper paints when my GW stuff wears/runs out.

If you just want to paint stuff normally, you'll be satisfied with how it behaves. If you want to end up doing really great paintwork, you'll really like this stuff.

I'm looking forward to what others have to say about these -- I was considering asking the same question, even though I have my own opinion!

They are pretty good, but as said above, it can get pretty chalky, so you have to thin it down with water.

I like 'em.

Thanks for your input folks...

...I used some yesterday and posted this up because I wasn't sure if I was using it right. I think I just wasn't used to the matte look it had when drying... and it seemed to dry a little quicker than I'm used to with other paints. I've mostly been using Vallejo, P3, and GW prior to this.

So far, I'm impressed (I may even consider buying the whole set next time I'm up in the Bay Area visiting Black Diamond Games in Concord ).

Again thank you for your input.

djphranq wrote:So far, I'm impressed (I may even consider buying the whole set next time I'm up in the Bay Area visiting Black Diamond Games in Concord ).

If this were Facebook, I would be clicking that "Like" button right about now.

djphranq wrote:Thanks for your input folks...

...I used some yesterday and posted this up because I wasn't sure if I was using it right. I think I just wasn't used to the matte look it had when drying... and it seemed to dry a little quicker than I'm used to with other paints. I've mostly been using Vallejo, P3, and GW prior to this.

So far, I'm impressed (I may even consider buying the whole set next time I'm up in the Bay Area visiting Black Diamond Games in Concord).

It does tend to dry very matte-style, and occasionally it can be hard to tell if it's drying on the palette or not. I'm actually a huge fan of the matte finish it gives everything. Some paint I used ages and ages ago had a super high gloss finish and looked terrible. I much prefer this finish.

If you're using a bunch at once, they have some kind of drying preventer you can mix in. Or, if you want to be cheap, just a drop of water now and again will do the same trick. Don't use too much at once, so you can keep the thickness of the paint. If I'm mixing my own colors like I do with my GW stuff now, whenever I wash off the brush after a few minutes of painting (this helping to prevent paint from gumming up half the brush over time) I leave a good amount of water on the brush before dipping it back in, mixing a bit, and resuming work.

These problems and solutions may or may not be resolved by the use of a wet palette. I've never used one myself so I can't speak to its effectiveness; I'm a fan of custom blending paints as I go and I'm not sure how a wet palette would work with that. For large amounts of the same color it might.

I wish I had the money to buy a whole set of paints -- heck I wish I had the time to spend painting to justify buying that many!!

Candroth wrote:
These problems and solutions may or may not be resolved by the use of a wet palette. I've never used one myself so I can't speak to its effectiveness; I'm a fan of custom blending paints as I go and I'm not sure how a wet palette would work with that. For large amounts of the same color it might.

I wish I had the money to buy a whole set of paints -- heck I wish I had the time to spend painting to justify buying that many!!

A wet pallet is made for custom mixing on the fly. It is a piece of permeable butcher paper, on sponge, placed inside a close able container with water in it. The system replenishes any water that may evaporate out of your paint. You can even close the lid and put it in the fridge and work with the same mixes/blends the next day if you don't have time to finish.

For large amounts of paint, you will probably just want to get an empty dropper bottle (which reaper also sells) and store your custom color that way.

Well, by 'large amounts of paint' I meant more painting two or three Chimeras at once or a squad of infantry, not a whole half-ounce bottle.

But I did not know about the empty droppers, that may be handy anyway as I tend to want to make my own washes!

Oh man... so far I'm really loving this paint. I like how it mixes with water... even though its thinned out it seems to cover pretty well.

Here's what I've worked on using Muddy Olive (3 thinned coats applied):

Nice! I've only done details, not larger areas, but they looked pretty smooth.

Also, if those are meltaguns my IG army is crying. They have a serious supply problem with the Munitorum...

Okay... hitting a negative now... the bottle doesn't seem to want to give up the paint. I'm not sure if its the agitator or something else.

Give it a good shake, clean out the nozzle with a toothpick or a needle or somesuch the same you would with a clogged glue bottle or whatever, then another good shake. Give it a few hours for the bubbles in the paint to work their way out, and have at.

Yeah, I've found that the agitator sticks to the nozzle fairly readily, but other than that, I've been using reaper paints since I started painting, and I couldn't be happier with them. They blend well, are slightly cheaper, and I get better results with them than with GW paint.

Since you are mass painting, I recommend popping off the nozzle itself and poor some out onto your pallet.