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Hello guys and Gals,

I played Warhammer, and 40k back when i was in my early - mid teens, and then left the hobby for a good 10 or so years. However I'm now looking to come back and paint up my old models to a better standard as teenager me sucked!

After watching many guides, and reading lots of tutorials I have a good idea about what im doign except one thing. I have no idea what paints to start with and which companies paints to go with. Every guide I read just talks about Citadel, P3 and Vajello but no one talks about the bang for your back for a guy coming back to the hobby or new to it with a budget.

I don't have a huge budget so would like to get the best "starting Set" when it comes to bang per buck, any advice would be greatly appreciated

Welcome back to the hobby.

To be honest, you're probably going to end up spending quite a bit on paints. While you can always mix colours, once you get into painting there'll be a huge variety of shades, tints, warm colours, cool colours, etc. that you'll want to experiment with...

Anyway, to answer your question, I would recommend Army Painter for your purposes. You can get the Warpainter Starter Set (9 primary colours, a bottle of their 'quickshade,' and a brush) for 25euros. I highly recommend their quickshade product, as the name suggests, it can be used to quickly and effectively add depth to your miniatures when painted over a basecoat. They also sell a large range of coloured sprays which can be used as both a primer and a basecoat, and the colours are usually a pretty good match with the GW range.

From there, you can branch out and buy paints from any of the ranges (GW, Vallejo, Army Painter, etc.) as needed. They're all good quality and around the same price...

PiPaPo wrote:
Welcome back to the hobby.

To be honest, you're probably going to end up spending quite a bit on paints. While you can always mix colours, once you get into painting there'll be a huge variety of shades, tints, warm colours, cool colours, etc. that you'll want to experiment with...

Anyway, to answer your question, I would recommend Army Painter for your purposes. You can get the Warpainter Starter Set (9 primary colours, a bottle of their 'quickshade,' and a brush) for 25euros. I highly recommend their quickshade product, as the name suggests, it can be used to quickly and effectively add depth to your miniatures when painted over a basecoat. They also sell a large range of coloured sprays which can be used as both a primer and a basecoat, and the colours are usually a pretty good match with the GW range.

From there, you can branch out and buy paints from any of the ranges (GW, Vallejo, Army Painter, etc.) as needed. They're all good quality and around the same price...

Thanks for the welcome, and the advice

i'll take a look at this range and see what deals on them I can find potentially

Welcome back!

I'd like to second Army Painter, and their sprays, in particular. I use their leather brown to basecoat my orks, and it's nice and thick, and consistent. And they're a little easier on the wallet, to boot! At least, they are up here in Canada.

I would suggest that you look at your local store, see what brands they sell, and what colors you like, and make a decision from there.

The various paints are far from identical, but at a high level, they essentially do the same thing and all the miniature brands are pretty usable. The problem with talking about value is that local stores don't price them the same, and it doesn't help if there's this fantastic brand, but you can only get it by mail order.

Army Painter and Reaper both have good prices, but AP is a perfect example of a brand that I can only special order (which can take forever) with the exception if their shades. Also, a good example of how some colrs are fine and others are very limited (but who cares if you aren't painting in those colors).

P3 usually is well priced, but the colors are a bit different from the other ranges (which isn't necessarily a bad thing). Vallejo has starter boxes, that include a discount. GW is widely available (also with starter boxes) and has nice shades.

 Talys wrote:
I would suggest that you look at your local store, see what brands they sell, and what colors you like, and make a decision from there.

The various paints are far from identical, but at a high level, they essentially do the same thing and all the miniature brands are pretty usable. The problem with talking about value is that local stores don't price them the same, and it doesn't help if there's this fantastic brand, but you can only get it by mail order.

Army Painter and Reaper both have good prices, but AP is a perfect example of a brand that I can only special order (which can take forever) with the exception if their shades. Also, a good example of how some colrs are fine and others are very limited (but who cares if you aren't painting in those colors).

P3 usually is well priced, but the colors are a bit different from the other ranges (which isn't necessarily a bad thing). Vallejo has starter boxes, that include a discount. GW is widely available (also with starter boxes) and has nice shades.

Thanks for the input, unfortuantly My local store is not very local, so ill more than likely be ordering online, however this did make me consider taking the time to drive out to my nearest city to take a look at some more paints in the flesh so to speak

Yeah, a lot of it depends on what's near you. The main reason I use GW paints is because I'm at the store near me so often, and I just think, "Oh that's a shade I need," and pick it up. So yeah, if there's a store around you that you'll consistently go to, I'd chose that one mainly for convenience.

Edit: Got ninja'd. That's a shame, but lots of FLGS sell paints too, so if there are any of those around you could check them out?

Thanks ffor all the feedback, some of the stuff is so simple I just didnt really think of it that way

Gonna head into my town and local city during my days off this week and take a look at the FLGS and GW and see what takes my eye

Coat D'arms seems to be overlooked these days.

http://www.blackhat.co.uk/product-category/coat-darms-paints/
http://www.blackhat.co.uk/coat-darms/paint-sets/

Ten 18ml paints for £17.50. Granted, their yellow and orange colours can be a bit watery, as with some other ranges; but then there are the usual paint-over-white dodges, etc.

There's also Ral Partha Europe's Miniature Paints line.

http://www.ralparthaeurope.co.uk/shop/miniature-paints-c-54/?page=1&sort=20a

You might see them on shop racks in glass bottles, though they might have completely switched to plastic since I last looked.
Some of their more yellowish greens and cooler blues can be a bit thin, along with the usual yellows and reds. I was going to recommend their deep red and mustard paints as a red and yellow with surprisingly good coverage... but it looks like those were pulled, along with some other colours. Still, the price is definitely not bad for the better colours, and they still have an interesting range of shades for odd jobs. (Ever see so many purples and pinks in a small area?)

The Vallejo ranges are good with decent starter boxes, particularly good for matches with Historicals. The paints usually cover quite well too.

I'm also going to recommend the current GW paints. I've been using mix of brands for year but got the Project Paint box as a Christmas present. It's not cheap but has a decent selection of paints including the dry paints that I'm really liking. In fact their whole paint by numbers approach to the range is a real boon to me as someone with limited time To devote to painting.

It does mean they have a bewildering array of quite similar colours which might be a turn off but if you know what you want to achieve with out the necessary know how it makes life allot easier. You can literally pop in a GW store look at the chart they have and pick up any paints you might need.

The best possible "bang for buck" is to buy a lot of empty paint bottles, like these, (10ml is more than enough). Then buy larger 60ml bottles of Vallejo premium in the primary colours, like these. Then mix your own colours: Red + Yellow = Orange, Blue + Yellow = Green etc...

You can save even more money, by forgoing the premium black and just buy a regular artist acrylic black, like this, black paint always covers well no matter what the brand, so you don't need to pay a premium for it.

This will net you all the colours you need for less than £30. And it's less wasteful as you won't end up with colour you don't use.

Never buy washes or glaze, they are just watered down paint. Buy this, and this, and you can make all the washes and glazes that you'll ever need, with whatever paints you have.

You can also get metallic medium, but unless you're going crazy with metallics, it's probably easier to just buy a nice gold and silver from someone like Vallejo.

If you don't want to mix your own colours (shame on you!), then the best value is probably Coat d'Arms, and Vallejo. There is also WarColours, which I haven't personally tried, but the reviews have been decent: http://www.warcolours.com

I want to thank everyone for the responses, was really reassuring to have so much input in such a short amount of time.

I have put in a small order for some Paints, and a friend has given me some GW paints.

I have some models currently stripping down so will come back here to give everyone some updates in the future

thankyou for making me feel so welcome guys

Avoid covering your lovely models in cheap acrylic paint. They'll look rubbish no matter what you do. Stick with name brands and you'll do fine. You should invest in a decent brush or two and some 'Masters' cleaner and restorer to make sure they lady longer than a month

 andywalker07 wrote:
Avoid covering your lovely models in cheap acrylic paint. They'll look rubbish no matter what you do.

That's simply not true. As someone who works as an artist, and has used artist acrylics on miniatures, I can tell you from first hand experience, that black artists acrylic looks exactly the same as chaos black, and covers beautifully. The only real difference between artist paints and miniature paints is pigment count. For lighter colours that can be a problem because it makes coverage difficult, but that's not an issue for black. If you want to pay £2.50 for 12ml of black paint, then be my guest, but don't go telling people that cheaper paint will "look rubbish", when you don't actually know anything about it. It looks exactly the same, it works the same, and it's a great way of keep the cost of paints down.

Smacks...
I have found the bottles you recomended horrible.
The caps break far to easily.
So i have switched to other bottles..

mod edit: rule number one = be polite

Now this might sound like odd advice, but... I've got a buddy who paints his armies mostly with folkart paint from walmart that you can get for like 1$ per bottle. He just spends money on the games workshop washes for shading and army painter colored basecoat sprays.

I was reading a thread about doing that somewhere else, 3 really good painters have it a go with a wide variety of cheap paints. All were pleasantly surprised with how good they were, but all went back to miniature paints due to consistency with coverage between colours - purples and blues were apparently universally bad at coverage

It may be possible to use the craft paint stuff, I don't know how to pull it off - though perhaps Smack's got some brands and names to look out for. I remember using my mom's craft paints when I first got into this hobby back in grade school in 199*cough*. They...need to be stripped and repainted someday. But then again, so do most of the models I have from back then...

 General_K wrote:
It may be possible to use the craft paint stuff, I don't know how to pull it off - though perhaps Smack's got some brands and names to look out for. I remember using my mom's craft paints when I first got into this hobby back in grade school in 199*cough*. They...need to be stripped and repainted someday. But then again, so do most of the models I have from back then...

Don't do it! Its a part of your painting history you'll never get back. I still get nostalgic looking at my old stuff.

They come out too chalky for my liking. I think it's because the pigment isn't ground fine enough. With regards to cost, I'm curious how much paint most people get through. I could probably paint 100+ marines with a single pot of Macragge blue. That's £250 of models, what's an extra £1.40 for decent paint?

 andywalker07 wrote:
They come out too chalky for my liking. I think it's because the pigment isn't ground fine enough. With regards to cost, I'm curious how much paint most people get through. I could probably paint 100+ marines with a single pot of Macragge blue. That's £250 of models, what's an extra £1.40 for decent paint?

Hard to tell but there are some colors I go through a lot (chaos black, leadbelcher, mephiston red, ushtabi bone, nuln wash, agrax earthshade)

I've bought several pots of each of those.

And while I'm on it - whats with certain colors clogging up the stupid pot much more often than others? (white scar, bone colors I'm looking at you)

 chaosmarauder wrote:

 andywalker07 wrote:
They come out too chalky for my liking. I think it's because the pigment isn't ground fine enough. With regards to cost, I'm curious how much paint most people get through. I could probably paint 100+ marines with a single pot of Macragge blue. That's £250 of models, what's an extra £1.40 for decent paint?

Hard to tell but there are some colors I go through a lot (chaos black, leadbelcher, mephiston red, ushtabi bone, nuln wash, agrax earthshade)

I've bought several pots of each of those.

And while I'm on it - whats with certain colors clogging up the stupid pot much more often than others? (white scar, bone colors I'm looking at you)

Yeah, andywalker's point is true though: relative to the cost of the models that we see from most of the wargaming manufacturers, the cost of the paint is really insignificant on an ongoing basis. If you're using up 20 pots of paint in a year, you're probably painting a ton of models.

Where it does come into play is your initial investment, if you're one of the folks who wants to own a large paint collection. There are some of us who aren't very bright and when we look at a paint lineup, if we start to like it, we buy every single color they make (raises hand). After all, maybe it will come in useful! And then, it can get expensive No matter the brand you use, if you're just buying the colors that you actually use and replenishing them as you're running out, per mL it might be expensive, but as a proportion of the hobby spend, it's pretty small.

Regarding the colors clogging up the pot -- there are certain pigments that are much ore chalky than others; they're also the colors that are harder to paint, brushstroke free near-whites and reds are at the top of that list; blues and browns are on the opposite end. That's not unique to any brand, though.

 chaosmarauder wrote:

 General_K wrote:
It may be possible to use the craft paint stuff, I don't know how to pull it off - though perhaps Smack's got some brands and names to look out for. I remember using my mom's craft paints when I first got into this hobby back in grade school in 199*cough*. They...need to be stripped and repainted someday. But then again, so do most of the models I have from back then...

Don't do it! Its a part of your painting history you'll never get back. I still get nostalgic looking at my old stuff.

I suppose that's true. But I'm too embarrassed to field them (and I don't want to own stuff I'm not fielding - I'm certainly not going to *display* those models!)

Though, I still have about 8 Eldar Guardians from the early 90s, lead ones, for which I've now lost the arms...that could do with stripping/painting/repainting: (these were actually the very first minis I ever bought. I got 20 of them for $20 in '97 from a flea market. Never did play Eldar in the end. And I'm not sure where the others got to. You can see the craft paint on three of them though (the blue and yellow).

You're absolutely right they are expensive and I advocate mixing colours from a smaller range. Red, blue, green, yellow, white, brown and black. As previously mentioned you can get away with using cheap black acrylic too. You could probably mix your own red and brown too but it's a chore I find.

And yes Chaos, washes I do go through very quickly. If anyone has a cheaper alterative that produces results as good then I'm all ears


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Some people are more sentimental than others I guess. I wouldn't keep something I didn't like just for nostalgia but that's just me. I recently offloaded some of these myself recently. If I'm honest Eldar are really my thing so was an easy decision

 andywalker07 wrote:

Some people are more sentimental than others I guess. I wouldn't keep something I didn't like just for nostalgia but that's just me. I recently offloaded some of these myself recently. If I'm honest Eldar are really my thing so was an easy decision

heh--I'm a professional historian...waxing nostalgic is practically a job requirement!

andywalker07 wrote:mod edit: rule number one = be polite

Bit strong, isn't it? I agree with Smacks myself - 'cheaper' doesn't automatically mean 'bad', particularly where Vallejo's concerned (they've been in this game a while and do a lot more than mini paints) and it's not difficult to be cheaper than almost £3 per 12ml.

I've used craft paint myself. There are a couple of wonky brands, but I've had decent results with bottles of Anita's and Folkart that I've found over here. Coverage can be iffy, but IMO not much more than some mini brands. Something that might take a bit more getting used to than the highly saturated lines around these days, if you're getting (re)started with mini painting, but nothing to be dismissed out of hand either.

The trick to using craft paints rather than hobby paints is to make the transparency of thin layers work for you.

Paint a good solid undercoat in your shade color, then start applying layers of your top highlight color. Since the shade will show through a couple layers of properly thinned craft paint, you can get suprisingly subtle transitions this way.

Of course, you do need to take care. Some brands of craft paint (and sometimes individual colors within a brand)do have quite coarse pigment and don't work well with minis. Always test with a disposable model - I use dollar store green armymen for testing. They're dirt cheap and disposable.

 andywalker07 wrote:
They come out too chalky for my liking. I think it's because the pigment isn't ground fine enough. With regards to cost, I'm curious how much paint most people get through. I could probably paint 100+ marines with a single pot of Macragge blue. That's £250 of models, what's an extra £1.40 for decent paint?

Well in my case it really does, im spending £0 on models as I am simply stripping and redoign models from my youth and comign back to the hobby with a very low budget, so every penny saved means another potetnial colour purchased.

Although for continued hobbiests I think your point is 100% correct

There may well be some good craft paints out there, my experiences have mostly been poor though. Low opacity, clumpy, oily messes. Whereas branded stuff has given me pleasant, smooth, matt, block colours. Again I come back to my point regarding not needing great volumes of the stuff. Unless you're painting large vehicles or scenery a small pot goes a long long way, and you only need a few different colours. You can get a base, layer, edge, 2 accent colours, a wash and black & white for lightning/darkening for what? £20? If you can't afford that, it may be worth considering a different hobby given the associated costs. Now I'm not saying a skilled painter can't get good results with craft paints, but an inexperienced painter? Hell no. The detail will get buried in the excessively thick layers leaving the poor sap to essentially freehand on all the details. Lots of new painters (myself included) struggle to get decent results with good paints at first, trying with crafts is just p£%sing in the wind.