Alternatives to GW paints

[TGSC]

This might not be news to some of you, but I'm excited

The advent of eBay meant that second hand models could be picked up for peanuts, avoiding Games Workshops ridiculous price hikes, the only reason to venture into a store was to buy paints. Paints that dried up because of new pots that didn't seal properly, and a new medium to improve coverage, but reduce shelf life. Not only that, the pot size shrunk by about a third (17.5ml-12ml) and went up in price by a thid to a half (I remember the good old days of 99p pots, £1.75 now)

However, I've been doing a bit of browsing on the warpath. on the orc and goblin forums, and someone mentioned some different suppliers of acrylic water based paints.

Through a bit of googling, via this blog, I've found:

http://www.gladiatorgames.co.uk/coat_d'arms_paints.htm
EDIT - url= tag doesnt seem to work for some reason
EDIT2 - nuh? neither does standard url tags, what am I doing wrong? just copy and paste

Coat d''Arms paints - Who produce the same paints as GW used to use, for £1.30 a pot, 18ml pots (thats bigger than the MkII GW pots kids, dunno if they kept the shape) along with a handy conversion chart

Or, for further nostalgia

Foundry Paint System - Who appear to have the MkI pots, but in whopping 20ml pots, dunno if you can buy them seperately.

Enjoy

[IBBoard]

Cool, might have to look at getting those anything to make a student budget stretch further in GW paints is good

As for what you're doing wrong, the pattern it tries to match for a URL probably doesn't like the apostrophe:

Coat d'Arms Paints - convert it to it's character code (google search the character and you'll be able get the character code - %27) and it should work

[IBBoard]

Cool, the local stockist was clearing his supplies because he wasn't ordering them any more. I'm not sure on the conversion of all of the colours I bought (I forgot to take the sheet!) but for £10 I got 18 paints and TGSC picked up 6. That should give me a nice variety and keep me going in old-style paints for a bit!

[IBBoard]

OK, triple post, but never mind.

One of the other paints I bought that day (because they'd sold out of old-brand black) was Rackham Colour. I think it was £1.50 for 20ml. I just used it today and yesterday and although it's slightly strange because it's thick and has a tiny nozel to squirt out of, it seems like a good paint. Squeeze a little blob, water down and you can't tell the difference with Chaos Black

[duckman]

Or, you could have a go at Vallejo Game colour and also their model colour range, this paint is excellent.
Another brilliant paint range is Derivan Minis, produced in Australia by Matisse. Their website has a colour converter, and the paints were develpoed specifically for miniature painting, in consultation with some very clever painters. The bottles have twist top droppers, are from memory 36 ml and cost about 5 bucks AU, a touch more for metallics, which converts to about sod all for those in the UK. AU$2.4 = 1 quid.

cheers
duckman

[IBBoard]

5AU$ would be, roughly, £2. Same as the current GW Prices, but at 36ml it's twice as much paint!

Next time I need some paint, I'll have to check out who sells which alternate brands in the local area. The guy who sold me the Rackham paint (he was an ex-GW Staffer) said that he'd still recommend GW metalics, though, even if he uses other brands normal paints.

[Simguinus]

I used to buy acrylic paint from art shops...you can pick up 59ml pots by a company called Liquitex who's colour range is pretty close to GW's. For enchanted blue substitute Brilliant Blue, for Chaos Black, Mars Black....they tended to be better for doing banner work as well. Plus, the pots are squeezy, so you can avoid the annoyance of spilling half a pot when trying to get some into the pallette....

[IBBoard]

I've sometimes wondered about standard art acrylics, but I always assumed that there was something different with them and that they might not be as suitable for model work. I know some people (more old-GW) use Humbrol Enamels and the like, but they're terrible for cleaning etc and don't give such natural effects.

[Simguinus]

Yeah, I used some of the Humbrol stuff. True enough, it's a bugger to clean off yer brushes and there's something not quite right about its colour - a bit like some of the gloss varnishes people use on their models.

One of the great things Humbrol did do was a chrome metal paint that had a mirror shine to it - it was really metal looking. I tended to use it for Eldar / Pointies, while restricting SMs et al to BGM and Tin Bitz. They seem to have stopped manufacturing it though, or not as shiny anyway.

But most artists acrylics are good enough. The Liquitex stuff is the pre-filtered for airbrush use type; acrylics that come in tubes, while fine for palette work, suck at use on models. They do mix well, though. Again, comingin squeezy tubes that are easily controlled when mixing are a bonus.

[IBBoard]

Since the original posts, Gladiator Games have moved to the CoatDArms.com domain. It means they've got a slightly better website (now running on osCommerce, I think, so it's not just a MS Frontpage template site) but it does mean that their central conversion chart has gone.

Behold - I have now mirrored the original Coat d'Arms to Games Workshop paint name conversion chart, complete with links to the Coat d'Arms product pages, where possible