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After taking a look around and noticing that all the cool gaming companies have their own line of paints, Rackham decided to join in on all the fun and do the same. :S

 

PRESENTATION

RACKHAM COLOR, RANGE OF PAINTS

RACKHAM is launching its Rackham Color range of paints
including 50 different colors.

Each pot holds 20 ml,
which is the largest quantity available in the French market.

STARTER PAINT SET
Start painting fantasy miniatures with the RACKHAM COLOR range of paints.

This box includes 1 paintbrush and 9 pots of paint:

<table cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" border="0" class="txt_c3_t3"> <tbody> <tr> <td width="15"></td> <td>- Eternal White</td> <td width="30"></td> <td>- Accursed Black </td> <td width="30"></td> <td>- Ephren Blue</td> <td width="15"></td> </tr> <tr> <td></td> <td>- Diisha Green</td> <td></td> <td>- Soil of Avagddu</td> <td></td> <td>- Pearly Flesh</td> <td></td> </tr> <tr> <td></td> <td>- Rackham Red</td> <td></td> <td>- Lahn Yellow</td> <td></td> <td>- Polished Silver</td> <td></td> </tr> </tbody> </table>

It also includes a Daïkinee elf miniature, the cards to play it in Confrontation 3,
and an exclusive painting guide.
This 16-page booklet introduces the basic vocabulary and techniques required
for painting miniatures as well as tips for painting the model provided.

You can see for yourself  - http://www.rackham.fr/html/color.php?lg=EN

 

Rackham has had paints for some time now, IIRC.

If you had posted this at the end of 2005, you'd be right! But it's been a little over a year now.

Yeah, somewhat old news as they've released subsequent paint sets to this

wow, i'd never seen their paints. they're probobly bigger in the French market. How many lines of miniature paints are there now? GW, Reaper Pro Paints, Privateer, Vallejo Model as wll as Vallejo Game Color, Rackham. and that's not counting any model paints or craft paints. That has to be pretty close to saturation.

Don't forget all of the modeler's paints that preceded them, like Model Masters (in both enamel and acrylic), PollyS, Gunze Sanyo, Tamiya, Floquil, Humbrol and I don't know how many others I'm forgetting.

Testors too!

Oh, and Foundry's Paint System triads. Too bad they sells only in sets of three, which is really useful when you need to replace only one jar. Ah, and Coat d'Arms! Who probably manufacture said paints as well as being the makers of the original Citadel Colors. Sure is a lot of paint out there...

And while you mentioned the Reaper Pro Paints you forgot the superior Reaper Master Series paints.

The most important question is are these Rackham paints any good?

Has anyone had experience using them? I've always used GW paints myself but am looking to branch out. I've heard good things about Vallejo and am looking to get one of their military paint sets for my Krieg Army.

 

The question of whether they are any good is answered by your knowledge of your own skill level. In the hands of a beginner these paints are very unfriendly. In the hands of anyone who paints to tabletop standard, or slightly above that, there's no real reason to expand outside of something like Vallejo Game Colour since that pretty much fills every need.

However if you're an advanced painter, then Rackham paints will fit the bill. They're latex-acrylic, not simply acrylic. That is why they smell so unusual. Accordingly, they dry slowly, giving you more time to blend and work with the paint. The pigment load is high, as high as the vehicle can tolerate without becoming grainy, and is also finely ground - so there is no grain to it like there is with many Vallejo Model Colour paints. The paints are also very thick, so when you put a dab on your palette you'll be keeping your brush wet as you work with it in order to pull away small amounts of paint from the dab at a time. Alternatively you could unscrew the bottle top and add water if you prefer. It's fine to work with it straight, but as above if you're a tabletop standard painter who is used to using broad strokes to cover quickly as opposed to fine, delicate work, that'll just result in leaving a big smear of thick gooey paint on your mini.

Because of the thickness, some people have trouble pouring them out. Which I can't understand. These people must have never seen a squeezeable ketchup bottle in their entire lives. Because the paint is so thick and slow you have to actually get it to the nozzle before you can squeeze it out - a principle everyone who has ever used ketchup comprehends without fail. So just give the bottle a good shake towards it's top.

Thanks Caern

Thats very helpful.

I've only ever used GW paints mostly out of laziness and easy access. I like GW inks and metalics but am getting fed up with the normal colour range, and want something with more natural realistic colours for my Krieg Army.

I saw the Vallejo website and was impressed with the bottle design and colour chart. Although of course it's very hard to get an idea to the consistency or qualities of companies paints from photos online and product descriptions.

So do you find that Vallejo model colour in general is quite grainy? More or less so than GW colour? I'm investing a lot in these Kreig miniatures and really want a paint that will do them justice and give a good spectrum of realistic natural colours.

To answer your question I'm an advanced painter that will be looking at painting to a display standard.

If you're looking for a high end paint I'd lean towards Rackham over Vallejo Model Colour

VMC offers a lot of colours. A *lot* of colours. But they're of mediocre quality. The paint does have a number of qualities though that make it suitable for display painting, colours that you would otherwise have to mix on the palette yourself or that are difficult to duplicate using GW or Vallejo Game Colour paints. The binder in the paint is the weakest I've ever seen in an acrylic, ever. For display painting that's mostly a good thing, in some ways a bad thing. The binder (and when I say binder, just to explain, the binder is whatever medium that the pigment is bound to. Saying 'acrylic' all the time can sometimes be misleading since a few types of acrylic paints have little actual acrylic in them) is highly fluid, and pretty horrible at actually binding to the pigment. That means that often you'll sqeeuze out a VMC colour without thinking to give it a good minute's shaking and out will come a lot of clear, soupy (in viscosity) fluid with a small amount of pigment in it before you get the actual pigment to come out.

Because this binder is so poor at holding the paint attached to itself you get the pretty major benefit of being able to work with *relatively* raw pigment (and fillers, brighteners, etc.). The paint is workable for a long time. You can even, with careful technique and a damp but not waterlogged brush, *remove* existing layers of model colour that you have applied. That takes practice though. And again because it's workable so long it's very easy to perform blending. It's also easy to control how much pigment you load onto your brush so you can paint delicately.

The downside of that binder is that sometimes you will accidentally lift colours from the underlayers without wanting to. If you work an area too much, and that area consisters entirely of model colour, you can end up removing multiple layers with one bad stroke. VMC makes advanced painting techniques like NMM easier than with other paints, but also more difficult in that if you push too hard or work an area too fast, you can lift the whole thing and ruin all your work. So you have to be very patient with it when working on areas that have multiple layers.

As for the pigment itself, it's a mixed bag. It's not consistently ground. You will frequently squeeze out a colour and find that when you begin to spread it out, there are large grains here and there. Not huge, but large enough that they'd make a small bump on your minis. Normally, when making fine paint, a manufacturer will mill it a second or third time to make sure that the pigment is thoroughly ground. It looks like for their VMC line they are milling it once. Maybe twice. So sometimes you're painting on a skin tone, doing a face in detail, and get a small lump hidden in with the paint you apply, which you then have to lift off carefully. Kinda annoying. Certain colours are consistently flawless, and others aren't. I've gone through multiple bottles of the problem colours and the inconsisent milling was present in those second and sometimes third bottles, so I know it wasn't just a bad bottle on my end.

It's a pretty good paint overall, but the hidden graininess can get annoying, and you have to take it slow. Sometimes I've been doing some NMM and working at a good pace and accidentally lifted layers underneath because I was going too fast.

edit: I should also mention that VMC has nothing in common with VGC. VGC is a totally different animal, with strong colours that are highly opaque (except yellows and oranges, but that is a charactertisic of the typical pigments used in making yellows, which I won't discuss in this post) though they require a good shake beforehand to make sure it's all mixed well. The binder is very strong and very fast drying, and fairly elastic. It's very durable paint. I use VGC to block in the colours on my minis because it's so durable and quick to dry.

Hi Caern

Thanks, thats a really interesting and indepth reivew. I think that the issue with the pigments could be problematic for 28mm miniatures. I think perhaps VMC is aimed more at 50mm (or larger) historical figurines and 1/35 or bigger vehicles? Hence the levels or coats of paints wouldn't be so much of an issue as your working over larger generally flatter surfaces.

For my krieg I think this may be a real problem as obviously I'm going to want to do a lot of gradual layering and shading/highlighting. It maybe nice for blending though. I think also in very small areas with lots of surface detail that issue of 'removing' previous coats with water would really annoy me. I like to take my time but i also like to batch paint basic colours quickly. Given the nature of an Imperial Guard Platoon I really don't want to be waiting 20 min to and hour inbetween each coat or layer of colour. That will really slow me down. How long on average would you say "long" is?

I'm really glad I read this before shelling out 100 pounds on a Military colour paint box set...

The problem is though that I'm trying to avoid the more brash and bold "comic book" style harder colours of most Gaming or fantasy paint lines. The VGC looks very bold (much like some of the GW paints). Whats the Rackham selection like?

Is it good for military/ realistic painting?

Also I suppose another issue is given the huge range of colours in VMC do you think these risks or niggles are worth the risk? 

Not all VMC colours are grainy, as mentioned above some are flawless. If you're looking for exact military colours they also can't really be beat in terms of selection in acrylic paints. Even with the best colours though the problem/benefit of lifting is always present. But I've never gotten a grainy ultramarine, or olive green, etc.

I will say though that VMC smoke is the best damn colour in range though. It is a naturally transparent pigment so when thinned with water it helps dirty up metals, be they NMM technique or metallics, make clothing look neglected, or as the base layer underneath a rust effect a person plans to execute.

One disadvantage to this huge range of colours is that VMC seems to have used whatever pigment it could find to duplicate that colour with (a lot of it's paints consist of more than one pigment, usually at least 2) without regard to the nature of the pigment. Artist's paints always label the paint with a symbol to indicate whether the pigment is opaque, semi-opaque, semi-transparent, or transparent. Vallejo doesn't do this. So I was quite frustrated to find that VMC's Olive Green is a naturally transparent pigment, and requires many many layers to be seen at full strength. Again that's mostly an upside since if you're patient you can make some incredibly smooth blends without much effort (just time), but it was kind of a shock since I was expecting a semi-opaque pigment instead.

Rackham is somewhere between GW/VGC (VGC colours are pretty close to GW, which was intentional, even though the performance is quite different) in terms of vibrancy. It offers a number of single pigments which are naturally less ... comic-ish, to use your term, since they don't have brighteners in them. That doesn't mean the colours aren't full strength and bold, but it's a boldness of purity rather than colour. Steel Blue for example is a very strong colour, but it's definitely not a vibrant blue - it's meant to be used to mimic the reflection of the sky on polished metal, or to be mixed with a hint of a warm grey to produce a spot-on light urban camoflague scheme in conjunction with a darker blue grey. Even so, there are still a lot of vibrant VGC/GW type colours in the line, and you'll find these right alongside the more realistic colours like Steel Blue or Naples Yellow (I forget what Rackham's version of Naples Yellow is named...). GW/VGC don't even offer a Naples Yellow type of colour (a yellow that's less... yellow. It's not so bright, but it's a pure yellow and not a yellow-brown). The Rackham range is really split 50/50 on realism and vibrant colour. For skin tones though Rackham can't be beat in my opinion. GW/VGC's problem is the limited number of colours means you have to blend your own to do realism. Some of VMC's skin tones are problem colours with hidden grain, and the face is not a place you want grain. Rackham definitely is meant for blending though and artist's techniques so there is an expectation with them that if you want to make them more realistic, you'll do some blending.

As a sidenote, if you have a colour you feel is too vibrant but you like the nature of the colour, you can gray it down by adding it's complementary colour - the opposite colour on your typical colour wheel. Any two complementary colours mixed together in equal amounts make a grey, and in uneven amounts, grey down the stronger colour. They have to be genuine opposites though. This is kind of difficult to do with GW/VGC/VMC/Rackham... well any non-artist's paint, since these companies don't list all their pigments on the bottle properly, and the paints are often made with more than one pigment, so you can get surprises when it turns out that nice orange you liked is actually not a single pigment, but red and yellow interwined on a level you can't see with the naked eye, and so adding blue doesn't get you grey, it gets you brown. Definitely do tests first when trying to grey down a colour using paints for miniatures. Artist's paints are a different story - the majority of colours in a range of artist's paints are single pigments (and are always labelled) and figuring out what their opposite is, is pretty obvious. Skintones are always an exception. Other than rose, a skintone is *always* made from multiple pigments. There are no commonly available single pigments that look like flesh, except for rosy flesh.

I'd definitely pick and choose Rackham paints individually if at all possible, inspecting them in-store, and choosing the ones you think are going to fit your realism. The lid just unscrews and you can have a peek inside. Don't be surprised to see a huge ball of paint inside with the consistency of jello. That's just what latex is like. You can add water (a tiny drop at a time, shake well) if it's not workable. If you can only order online (that's my situation), trying a small sampler of colours you have chosen carefully is the best way to go about things before diving in since they're so different.

Rackham paints come in a bottle that's the dead middle between Vallejo and GW. They are contained in a squat little pot, and the top can be screwed off to give you access to the full mouth of the bottle, but the top has a dropper on it so  you can squeeze out small amounts at a time. Much akin to the tops of Golden Fluid Acrylic paints, or most kinds of soft body or fluid acrylic paints. It'd be nice if they sold these bottles seperately since the squat bottle is perfect for mixing your own frequently used colours, and the dropper. gives you control over how much is released. Vallejo does have a better, finer dropper though. Vallejo's dropper can have a downside. It's removable, and some paints as they age will collect in the cap and tug on the dropper. I have unscrewed a cap and removed it and quickly overturned the bottle in order to get a drop of paint out rapidly while my other stuff is still wet, only for the dropper to fall off and paint to pour right out. This is pretty rare though, and if you're not as much of an idiot as I am about it and look to see if it's on securely before squeezing, it'll never happen to you.

I think also in very small areas with lots of surface detail that issue of 'removing' previous coats with water would really annoy me. I like to take my time but i also like to batch paint basic colours quickly. Given the nature of an Imperial Guard Platoon I really don't want to be waiting 20 min to and hour inbetween each coat or layer of colour. That will really slow me down. How long on average would you say "long" is?

Forgot to answer this in my above post. I'll explain the nature of the VMC binder and that should give you a good idea of what I'm talking about.

First off, this binder is mostly clear, but has a very faint yellowish tint to it. Very faint. Not visible in smal quantities. It dries extremely slowly. A thin layer consisting purely of this binder will take at minumum 10 minutes to fully dry. Over the course of that time it goes from wet to sticky to dry. A drop of it on your palette will usually stay wet for at least twice as long. It is, as mentioned before, very poor in terms of actually binding the pigment. They pigment is not so much bound to it as it is *suspended* in it and intermixed with it. The two seperate easily.

When you shake a VMC bottle well, the binder and the pigment intersperse, and you get paint that is reasonably dry in 1 minute or so in a thin layer, but which is still workable, can be rubbed off, is still wet underneat, etc. for the next two to five minutes. This varies from pigment to pigment. Have you ever noticed that most miniatures-range whites tend to dry a lot faster than some colours, making them somewhat chalky in a thin layer and inconsistent? That is simply the result of the fact that the white is made with titanium dioxide, and no matter what company you go with, titanium whites are always going to dry faster (though chalkiness and covering power can be improved or altered by choosing a different brand). If you need a slower drying white you can use a Zinc white, but Zinc white is transparent and won't cover - it is strictly for blending. So some colours still dry in a matter of seconds, though still far longer than VGC.

Anyways, back to the VMC. Alright. So when you shake well, you get the above properties. What if you don't shake well and the paint and binder seperated in the bottle? Well first you'll squeeze out a bunch of this binder fluid, and a little bit of pigment as well. Don't use this stuff because it takes ages to dry as discussed above. If you do you'll have to just avoid painting that area of your mini for awhile because you would just make it a mess. After you've squeezed out the binder you'll get nearly raw pigment and the water in it, with a minimal level of binder. It's usually a little on the thick side but spreads out easily enough and is easy to work with. It'll 'dry' when the water evaporates out of it, but because there is little to no binder in it, this paint can be reworked and lifted (sometimes by mistake) for days, and days. You also *must* seal your finished mini with a varnish of some kind because in this state, the pigment can be simply rubbed off.

i would suggest grabbing a bottle or two of vallejo and see how they work for you.

i have found some colors in the vallejo range to be awsesome and some to be just crap. and I like thin paints to begin with, so .... it's best to form your own opinion based on experience..

just my 2 cents..

Hi 2 heads, thanks for that.

From what I've been reading from Caern I think actually I like the sound of the vallejo.

For me the main issue is the cost of GW paints. They just keep going up. While I was GW staff I wasn't bothered as i got them cheap, but now I really don't want to be paying 2 pounds a pot when vallejo is nealry half the price (and from reports i'd heard) just as good.

I saw a Vallejo military set on an online store at a reduced price, about 70 pounds. Its a very large paint set and would have all the colours i really like in the range. I still have loads of old pots of GW paint as well but its running out and I'm trying to find a decent replacement thats more cost effective. Failing that i would like a range thats equal in price but superior in quality (perhaps a bit much to ask?).

I'll try a few pots of vallejo first to check the consistency myself.

Are there any colours in particualr that you guys have found to be difficult?

I like thin paints also.

Are there any colours in particualr that you guys have found to be difficult?

In terms of the ones that are simply poorly made, off the top of my head: All skintones, sky green, ice yellow, US. Bluegrey. US Bluegrey is actually a favorite colour of mine and it's not *that* bad, but when you are using a lot of it (such as making it the main colour for a piece of clothing, etc.), you'll find some grain.