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I'm curious as to people's thoughts on this.
While i love the colours of GW's metallic range, the paints themselves tend to be chalky rubbery garbage (and I'm really sick to death of buying new paints that are already mostly hardened) so I'm looking for good alternatives (particular to their range of brasses and bronzes.)
I'm not the biggest fan of Vallejo's metallic range which I find is often a wee bit too iridescent and I find making my own metallic paints to just be too bothersome and often more expensive than it's worth.
Thoughts?

GW metallics the best I've used out of GW, P3, Vallejo and Army Painter.

There's something really wrong with yours if you would class them as "chalky, rubbery garbage". It almost sounds like you've been trying to use the dry paints??

Not to teach you to suck eggs or anything, but make sure you're using some combination of the base and layer GW paints and not the dry ones. If you're getting base and layer paints that are dried up, then get them replaced as they shouldn't be like that. Then just make sure you close the pots correctly after using them.

They really are good.

Vallejo model air aluminium is the best metal I've ever used. It's the only silver I use nowadays. Works perfectly. I just mix it with black if I need a darker shade.

Vallejo has an entire Metal Color line I've heard good things about, but I have no experience with it myself as I don't have an airbrush.

Bellyfluff wrote:

There's something really wrong with yours if you would class them as "chalky, rubbery garbage". It almost sounds like you've been trying to use the dry paints??

Nope, Games Workshop just makes terrible paints (and i say this as someone with a background in fine arts who has made quite a bit of his own paints over the years and i'm doing my best not find your assumptions insulting.)
The fact that their pots are so awful is a big part of it (and a large part of why many people end up buying new paint pots that already half dried out) but they also use terrible pigments and thinners.
In short- they have a good colour range but the paints, themselves, are of incredibly poor quality.



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 Ghaz wrote:
Vallejo has an entire Metal Color line I've heard good things about, but I have no experience with it myself as I don't have an airbrush.

The Vallego range have a good consistency and some of them have good colour acuity but, in general, their metallics tend to be a bit too iridescent for my liking.

Here's a pic of the Metal Color paints airbrushed straight onto plastic spoons.

Vallejo liquid gold range is very good, i just hate working with it for too long

SOLD! I'll be picking up the metal colour range!

The Vallejo range is really nice and quite wide bit don't have the sort of... dirty brass and bronze I'm looking for (specifically the 'screaming bell' and 'warplock bronze.')


Automatically Appended Next Post:
It should be pointed out that the range that Ghaz so kindly posted a picture of is water based acrylic (as opposed to Vallejo's other line of alcohol based metallics) and, while formulated for airbrush use, works great with brushes.
(Again, my only problem with the range is the slightly iridescent aspect of them. Outside of that, they're some of the best metallic model paints I've seen and I use them, frequently, in my work outside of scale modelling.)

 joseph_curwen wrote:
I'm looking for (specifically the 'screaming bell' and 'warplock bronze.')

It helps knowing that you're looking for specific colors. Have you tried Coat D'Arms? They produced GW's original paint line and their equivalent of Warplock Bronze (originally Tin Bitz) is Magic Metal. Screaming Bell is a new color and doesn't have an equivalent from Coat D'Arms.

 joseph_curwen wrote:
Automatically Appended Next Post:
It should be pointed out that the range that Ghaz so kindly posted a picture of is water based acrylic (as opposed to Vallejo's other line of alcohol based metallics) and, while formulated for airbrush use, works great with brushes.
(Again, my only problem with the range is the slightly iridescent aspect of them. Outside of that, they're some of the best metallic model paints I've seen and I use them, frequently, in my work outside of scale modelling.)

Are you sure you're talking about the same range, the "Metal Color" range, they come in significantly larger bottles than Vallejo's normal paints and they are extremely thin.

http://www.acrylicosvallejo.com/en_US/metal-color/family/33

I have several of them and the ones I have they don't look iridescent at all, not even slightly.

They're also not really great for hairy brush painting. They're extremely thin and separate very rapidly so they can be quite fiddly to use with a hairy brush and take several coats to build up a good layer, it can also be hard to hide brush strokes. They are also fiddly to clean up, because they're so thin the metallic flakes get drawn right up in to the ferrule of your brush and are a pain in the arse to clean out.

But if you're willing to put up with the annoying clean up and having to lay down lots of thin coats, they'll produce a very realistically shiny looking metal, the metallic flakes are very fine and settle well, so they'll give you that realistic metal finish rather than the flaky metal finish you get from a lot of other metallic paints.

They work great out of an airbrush if you are trying to get a realistic looking metal finish. Of course war gamers don't typically want a realistic metal finish, so I'm not really sure it's worth the effort (they can be quite fiddly to airbrush as well!). But if you're painting chrome on a model car or a natural metal finish on a P-51D Mustang, they work great.

I like reaper metals, they cover well imo. I still use gw too, mainly lead Belcher. For silvers and gold I use reaper.

 joseph_curwen wrote:

Bellyfluff wrote:

There's something really wrong with yours if you would class them as "chalky, rubbery garbage". It almost sounds like you've been trying to use the dry paints??

Nope, Games Workshop just makes terrible paints (and i say this as someone with a background in fine arts who has made quite a bit of his own paints over the years and i'm doing my best not find your assumptions insulting.)
The fact that their pots are so awful is a big part of it (and a large part of why many people end up buying new paint pots that already half dried out) but they also use terrible pigments and thinners.
In short- they have a good colour range but the paints, themselves, are of incredibly poor quality.

Wasn't meant to sound insulting. I've just had very similar comments on the paints from one or two people at my local club and it turned out they were trying to use the dry paints in a way they weren't really intended.

Think we'll just have to leave it as a difference of opinion here
I like the consistency, coverage and overall usability of the GW base metallics and have never noticed any issues like you were describing with them.

Good luck on your hunt, and it'd be interesting to see what you end up with.

Regards

I still can't understand why anyone even uses those 'dry' paints, honestly.
(And I do apologise for being so touchy in my first response.)
At this point I'm thinking of just biting the bullet and making my own (more expensive in the beginning but vastly cheaper in the long run and it would give me far more control over the colours I'm looking for.)