Acrylic Paints And The Battle of the Brands
Gamers are fickle people. Some will only every paint their models and figures with specific brands of paint. They are quite happy paying £3 or more of a tiny bottle of their favourite colours supplier.
I used to be like this when I used Humbrol Enamels over 25 years ago. It took a very bad experience with Tamiya Acrylics to put me off using them for years. I finally bit the bullet and bought a selection of Humbrol acrylics and never looked back. I then started trying different brands and before long ended up with hundreds of acrylics of all different shades.and hues.
It took a conversation with an old contact in Australia for me to look elsewhere and see that I had been overlooking a very cheap source of good quality acrylics. The Art Supplies sector. Artists use lots of paint in huge amounts and are always lixing their own shades. They tend to buy their paint on bulk and it cones in 2oz squeezy plastic flip top bottles under brands like Crafters, Decoart, Decorart DoCraft and other names of a similar nature. A quick search on EBay for Acrylic Paints this morning brought up over 33,000 lists. This included the usual wargamers supplies as well as artists supplies.
If you cant face EBay shopping theres always other sources for paints on the high street.
Hobbycraft carries Humbrol Acrylics and if you have no idea if theres a local store to you though just use their store finder option, http://www.hobbycraft.co.uk/
They offer Free Postal Delivery or Click and Collect of you spend £30 plus they carry loads of
other things that are useful for gaming. You can always just walk in and check out what stock the store has.
If not them have you tried The Works for very cheap generic paint.
https://www.theworks.co.uk/storelocator Order online for collect in store too that way you get what you want.They do have sales every so often and have a lower minimum spend for free delivery too.
Finally theres the good old fashioned decent Arts and Graphics Suppliers shop.
I live near the Olympic Park and my local shop is called http://www.eastlondongraphic.co.uk/
They sell art supplies, glues, pens, pencils, paper, card plus more paints than you
could shake a stick at.
I use the 2oz bottles for base colours nowadays to supplement the
specialist shades that you just cant find generically. So dont over look these as a good place to buy paints. Remember the name on the bottle is only a guide. Only your imagination is stopping you from using that bottle of Dark Grey instead of a four times the cost branded acrylic paint called Panzer Grey to paint that tank. Remember that what looks right to the human eye at 100% scale will be far too dark when its applied to much smaller models and you have to adjust the shade and hues to get the TLAR* finish that you want on your model, soldier, ship, aircraft etc.
Oh in case you were wondering what TLAR* is?
That Looks About Right !
Its a very good point. I picked up some cheaper (volume wise at least) Acryllics for using on buildings. But ran out of my usual vallejo black paint. I found a spare bottle and mixed some of cheaper version into a thinner mix and job done!
ReplyDeleteI get a lot of the cheap acrylic paint from The Range shop, which I use for bases and scenery. Certainly works very well for that.
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