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I used to be an avid GW model painter, but now that I have kids, I paint sporatically at best. Every time I get back at it, my GW paints are dried beyond reasonable salvaging. Is any other kid of paint better? What paint should I get so I dont have to spend $100 on paint to do a $5 model every couple of months?

Anything with a dropper bottle as you can screw those down nice and tight.

Vallejo would be a conventional alternative, as would army painter.


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There is also INSTAR for a paint range specifically designed to replicate GW shades through history and they come in droppers too. A bit cheaper from what I recall, but I tried a couple and personally wasn't impressed by the coverage. Others may have had different experiences though.

Honestly Vallejo can be hard to get but they're pretty great. Still, I'd just learn to paint with ink in your case. Ink will live longer and it can easily be used for the majority of a model. That way you don't have to buy as many paints...

Depends entierly at what is avalible for you where you live, or if you are a web shopper.
Kinda pointless for us to reccomend brand xx or yy if they are not avaible to you.......


Oil paint might be something to think about, it is a transition ofc from acryllics, but that stuff hardly dry out.

 Flinty wrote:
There is also INSTAR for a paint range specifically designed to replicate GW shades through history and they come in droppers too. A bit cheaper from what I recall, but I tried a couple and personally wasn't impressed by the coverage. Others may have had different experiences though.

My experiences with INSTAR vintage were 100% awful. The acrylic medium in them is worse than dollar store craft acrylics. Feels terrible on the brush, doesn't dilute nicely, pigmentation was weak. Add to that, as if it wasn't bad enough, the bottles I got had gunk around the top of some of them, dried up paint in the nozzles (had to unclog them all) and to top it off, they weren't even proper matches to the colours they were supposed to replicate. Like you had one job. One! I could have lived with all the other issues, including that some of my bottles were near empty rather than filled to the same level as the rest, but no, they aren't even good matches. Dead, lifeless looking colours with no undertones the way proper acrylics should have. Honestly they look like hardware store paint. Never again for me.

For a part-time hobbyist, get paint in dropper bottles. Whatever you've got locally, it's all good. Vallejo, Army Painter, Reaper; none are terrible. Personally I'd give Reaper the nod as the most newbie friendly paint. It comes in droppers, it doesn't require the ridiculous amount of shaking Vallejo does to counteract separation, it's already thinned some with flow aid, reasonably priced for a set and a wide range of colours. They also make great Learn to Paint boxes that come with everything you need to get started. That and Army Painter's Quickshades will keep you hobbying for many years to come.

 FrozenDwarf wrote:
Depends entierly at what is avalible for you where you live, or if you are a web shopper.
Kinda pointless for us to reccomend brand xx or yy if they are not avaible to you.......


Oil paint might be something to think about, it is a transition ofc from acryllics, but that stuff hardly dry out.

Oil is actually a fantastic suggestion. I agree entirely.

Just seen this thread and thought I'd copy this from another one I put this in to weigh in on the comments made by one of the posters.

Our Vintage and Paint line were part of our original line up which we're currently having a clearance sale one (Which the poster bought) so some of these paints may have been on the shelf for a while which may have contributed to the poor performance, especially with the smaller size (5ml) bottles, the paint and vintage line certainly are not ones to turn a nose up at as we have had many painters create some very nice works with them, paints are usually dependent upon your style of painting, some will work for others where the same brand may not work for someone else, it's not that the paints are terrible.

As a saying went in the marketing department at a previous employment "If there was one product that did everything that everyone wanted, there would be no point in anything else being made, but there isn't"



As for the colour matching, that's always going to be a question of personal opinion and one that's largely misinterpreted. Without knowing the exact pigments used by the original manufacturer, the concentrations they used as well as the paint mediums recipe itself, it's always going to be a "Close as we can get" affair and will never be 100% which is why we never say on the website that the colour matches are 100% accurate, but they are as close as we can get.



However, that was our original line and we subsequently improved that in 2019 with the launch of our Flagship line Alpha, thinner than any other paint on the market, higher pigmentation, designed to be painted like a thinned paint (i.e layering) to provide super smooth layers with no brushmarks at all, airbrushable straight from the bottle, can be easily turned into contrast, washes and glazes using our Water+ thinner (Which can be used with other paints) and in 2021, will be part of the biggest change to miniature painting in years with the previously mentioned "Mix it yourself kit"



As we make all the paint ourselves on site rather than a third party company making it means we're able to better understand how our paint works which has lead to the new mixing kits, but by providing recipes on our site as well as upcoming swatch cards and a simple calculator, it's possible to create any colour you like, in any style in any finish be that a highly matte paint, a shiny paint, metallic, contrast, wash etc it'll be the ultimate chance to make your own custom paint set that best suits the way you paint and best of all, you don't need a prior knowledge of paint mixing, the recipes are so simple to follow as it just involves counting drops of paint that even my six year old daughter can mix her own rainbow of colours easily.

The possibilities are quite literally endless and as the recipes are simple to follow, they are also simple to share..made your own unique colour? Just share the recipe and anyone, anywhere in the world who has the colours from the Alpha Pure line can recreate it.

Not to mention that our prices are very competitive compared to other brands on the market for much better quality

IMO you should get/make a wet palette. If you have a lid it'd remoisterize your paint as well.

I traditional ones has got a sponge in it, but I've seen new ones that's bascially just a tray with a thin film of water and a piece of baking paper on top.

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Never mind, scratch that. Yeah, agree with the tear drop bottled ones. Vallejo is what I use, but army painter and such all use the same kind of container anyway. You can probably buy a dozen drop bottles at a "normal" hobby shop or art supply store in your area too.

 Supershandy wrote:
so some of these paints may have been on the shelf for a while which may have contributed to the poor performance,

Nice when a company straight up tells you they're selling on old paint that degrades before they can even get it into a customer's hands. Seriously what's with this marketing spiel? Your whole post reads like an advertisement. "Professional painters can paint better than almost everyone else with our paint!" doesn't mean anything. Those crazy talented blokes can make craft store dollar paint look like a million bucks. I'm just an average hobbyist, like almost everyone else here and like the vast majority of the market for miniature paint.

I can't paint with stuff that's the consistency of snot, and waters down into dish water. Maybe my batch was bad. Maybe something happened in transit that ruined the paint. Maybe it was improperly stored before being sold. But you never tried to figure that out or make it better.

So my assessment stands; don't buy INSTAR Vintage.

Fire_Forever wrote:

 Supershandy wrote:
so some of these paints may have been on the shelf for a while which may have contributed to the poor performance,

Nice when a company straight up tells you they're selling on old paint that degrades before they can even get it into a customer's hands. Seriously what's with this marketing spiel? Your whole post reads like an advertisement. "Professional painters can paint better than almost everyone else with our paint!" doesn't mean anything. Those crazy talented blokes can make craft store dollar paint look like a million bucks. I'm just an average hobbyist, like almost everyone else here and like the vast majority of the market for miniature paint.

I can't paint with stuff that's the consistency of snot, and waters down into dish water. Maybe my batch was bad. Maybe something happened in transit that ruined the paint. Maybe it was improperly stored before being sold. But you never tried to figure that out or make it better.

So my assessment stands; don't buy INSTAR Vintage.

The people who painted these are just average hobbyists in their own words, and perhaps it has some marketing behind it, after all we are trying to sell a product that we've spent a long time developing, but ultimately we're pushing the Alpha line more that the original line.

We never aim our paint at professionals unlike other companies as we don't feel that's fair or representative.

The only thing we could attribute to the problem was the small size, these were however only made in small batches and it was missed by the quality check that the paints were not suitable to be sent out which we could only apologise for.

The Alpha line is much improved and goes beyond other paints on the market and was developed from the lessons learned from our first venture onto the market, honestly, we're really hurt by the fact you had a bad experience and we really wished you hadn't as we want people to have the best experience with our products

You paints are drying out over a couple of months? This seems odd I got into this last summer and my citadel paints are still fine. In fact a dried up isn’t something that I’ve come across in nearly 18 months and I have one la that I don’t use very often

Is it possible to buy empty P3 or coat d arms bottles? I think they're the best for not letting paint dry, though I'm not a massive fan of the paints themselves.

Vallejo bottles have been reasonably good for me, though some of my older ones are definitely thickening up a bit and I find the airbrush paints have a shelf life (some of my old vallejo air paint cause my airbrush to clog and splutter now).

I've looked into getting P3/Coat D'arms bottles, there's at least a couple of UK suppliers/stores. Sadly most of the options I looked at don't ship to Canada.

https://www.theplasticbottlescompany.com/shop/product/cap-20mm-tamper-evident-flip-top-white/

Plastic Bottle Co. has the best price, but they're set up for local / bulk orders.

https://www.shcweb.co.uk/store/20ml-plastic-paint-pot-with-white-flip-top-lid.html

Also stocks 'em, but much more expensive.