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I wanted to add weather powders to my painting arsenal as I will be doing a lot of Skitaari and Imperial Guard soon.

What are the most cost effective best quality brands out there? Mig? Secret Weapon? Forgeworld? Are the Forgeworld ones overpriced? The other brands seem to come in bigger pots.

I'm very new to these so any advice, insight, and help to which brand I should go with will be really appreciated.

Thanks!

DorianGray wrote:
The other brands seem to come in bigger pots.

This probably doesn't matter as much as you might think. As long as you put some paper down to catch the extra stuff that falls off the brush as you're putting it on the model even the FW-size pots are going to last a really long time. As in "weather a whole army and still have lots left over" long. Buy whatever you like best based on other factors, don't worry about price per volume.

MIG and SWM are pretty even in terms of quality and would be my go-to choice. So go for the one that has the colors you need.

Unless you are in England or have a US based supplier the FW ones will likely cost more.

I'd like to add a question to this. Can you use pastels as pigment, as in crush them up and apply them to minis?

TheLumberJack wrote:
I'd like to add a question to this. Can you use pastels as pigment, as in crush them up and apply them to minis?

You can, but you may have two problems:

1) The colors may not match what you want. Weathering powders are specifically designed for modeling and have the appropriate colors. Pastels may have equivalent colors, or they might not.

2) Weathering powders have a binder included to get them to stick to the model. Pastels don't. You'll need to seal the model with a varnish layer either way (unless it's a pure display piece that will never be handled), but the binder makes it a lot easier to get the powder to stay in place long enough to seal it. It's possible to work around this and maybe it fits the style you want but for most people it's probably just a significant increase in frustration for a very small cost decrease.

TheLumberJack wrote:
I'd like to add a question to this. Can you use pastels as pigment, as in crush them up and apply them to minis?

Sometimes in pastels you have wax or chalk that helps make the thing stick together (in stick form for exemple). When you file everything down and apply you are applying pigments and wax/chalk particules which might react differently from pigments when you try to seal everything. Sure Pastels are cheap but the end result can change upon sealing.

My teachers specifically told us to avoid pastel for those reasons.