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I'm looking at buying one. Is it worth it? What are your experiences with Army Painter brushes and paints?

Army painter I had good experience with there products.

There metallics, and washs I have a are good quality and effective. The colours are strong and can be thinned or uses thicker to cover up bad mistakes.

I did buy them a while ago though so my purchase is older. Year ish.

I mainly have the Army Painter inks and silvers, but also a few other colours and I've never had a problem with any of them. Easily on a par with Vallejo Game Colour.

Their Brushes are ok, nothing special but they get the job done. The Character brush and Insane Detail brush are pretty useful.

What about the black primer from army painter? If I buy the mega paint set I'm looking at adding a can of primer as well.

What little I've used of their paint/wash range has been good. On par with GW and VGC, while being far cheaper than the former and slightly cheaper than the latter. No experience with their tools or brushes.

AP primers are generally well liked, but apparently take a bit of getting used to. Be sure to follow the directions on the can and test on some scrap, first - optimal spray distance is shorter than with most other aerosols.

I'm a big fan of their warpaints and washes. I doubt I would get any mega set from anyone since I paint so slowly and they would more than likely dry out. But that is me.

Just responded to a thread about their primers, I have not had good luck, but they are a little unforgiving, just follow the directions precisely. You can't use them like Krylon, they have to be a certain distance. Like for real, a certain distance and they do not strip as far as I can tell. So don't screw up like I did.

I think that their paints are great. The washes are like the old GW washes. I pretty much use them exclusively without any issues and the warpaint are nice too. On par with GW and Vallejo game colors.

 oadie wrote:
What little I've used of their paint/wash range has been good. On par with GW and VGC, while being far cheaper than the former and slightly cheaper than the latter. No experience with their tools or brushes.

AP primers are generally well liked, but apparently take a bit of getting used to. Be sure to follow the directions on the can and test on some scrap, first - optimal spray distance is shorter than with most other aerosols.

Far cheaper is right. I pay $2.30 per bottle rather than $4.25 per pot for either GW and Vallejo, and you get more to boot. Plus there are spray primers that are a 100% color match. The paints themselves are great, though when I use them, I must thin quite a lot (way, way more than citadel layer).

Before you buy the mega set, make sure that it's actually cheaper than buying the paints separately. Where I live, the AP mega set paints come out to about $2.75 per bottle, and the GW mega set comes out to almost $5 per pot. The other issue is that since the big sets don't sell often, the paints could be older. Older paints tend to have a higher viscosity, even when unopened. For example, if you crack open a GW layer pot that's marked 2009 at the bottom, versus one that is 2013, and open both at the same time, you'll notice that the older one feels more like a base paint. They even sound different when shaken.

A word of warning with the AP range -- there are color gaps if you want to go all-out fantasy/scifi, and not a lot of variety. For instance, the purple and pink department is so woefully lacking that something like a Herald of Slaanesh or a Tyranid army would be a lost cause. Even on Green, one of AP's better ranges, they have around 4 shades, whereas GW has 17 or so. This is not so important if you have only 1 army, but it's an issue if you have multiple armies that use similar highlights -- for instance, Dark Eldar and Dark Angels. It's nice that you can choose Warpstone Glow/Moot Green or Kabalite/Sybarite Green as highlight paths for a subtly different effect (or Lorne Forest, or...). Yeah, you can mix your own colors, but have fun doing that consistently for a hundred models.

I did some more price research into this. While buying the mega set is cheaper than buying the paints separately, it's a bit pricier than alternatives. The set would cost me 99 euro so that's about 2.4 euro per paint. Meanwhile I can get Vallejo Game Color and Model Color for a bit less than 2 euro per color.

LordBlades wrote:
I did some more price research into this. While buying the mega set is cheaper than buying the paints separately, it's a bit pricier than alternatives. The set would cost me 99 euro so that's about 2.4 euro per paint. Meanwhile I can get Vallejo Game Color and Model Color for a bit less than 2 euro per color.

I would definitely get the Vallejo Game Color / Model Color over Army Painter if the price is favorable. The range is far superior, and the product is excellent.

Also, I'm not a big fan of the sets -- the way I collected paints was more focused around what I want to buy. For example, if I wanted to paint Orks, I'd buy 6 greens, 4 reds, black, white, and a couple each of browns, silvers, golds, and greys -- having shades of purple and blue won't do me a lot of good until I need them. That being said, when I first started buying Vallejo Model Air, some of the small box collections (with 8-16 paints) were MUCH cheaper at my hobby store.