Saturday 12 May 2012

Jumping ship to Vallejo - impressed!

With GW overhauling their paint range again and with my disastrous experience with both their purity seal and skull white sprays, I decided it was time to jump ship to Vallejo Game Colour. As I'm not made of money, I'll make the transition over time, replacing and buying new colours from the Vallejo range as necessary.

*

So I've been trying out my new colours as well as making some colour swatches to check compatibility (which look fine actually). And I must say I'm impressed so far. I like the consistency, it's quite thick but flows well and gives a smooth finish, unlike the GW foundation paints. Colour coverage is great....mostly. I've had issue with scaly green and jade green being watery, but I think they just need a lot more shaking. I hope so anyway. I'm also surprised that I like the dropper tops, although it increases wastage at each use, I think it will stop me throwing so many dried-up pots of paint away. Especially as with GW I can be lazy and paint straight from the pot or leave them open as I highlight a whole colour.

They even blew me away on price. I bought six pots and it came to £10-something at Dark Sphere, who sell at discount. A bargain compared to GW so I'm not surprised Vallejo are putting their prices up soon.

Issues? Well the colour swatches on the rack seem to occasionally be well-off, after settling on magic blue for the very specific shade I was after it ended up totally different to the colour I was after. But it still looks good on the minis that I wanted it for. Similarly, jade and scaly greens look like they should be different enough to be base coat and shade as I planned, but they actually look pretty much identical.

I shouldn't be surprised, I've heard many times that Vallejo were the paint of choice for many good painters these days. I'm actually a little disappointed that it took me so long to make the jump.

Hope y'all are having a nice weekend and enjoying the sunshine.
Phil

*(I didn't buy this set, it was just the most suitable image I could find :-) I'll post some pics of my results with Vallejo soon enough though!)

6 comments:

  1. I must admit I'm slowly swapping over to Vallejo , one of the handy things is that they are avaiable at Boyes (chain store)

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  2. Welcome to non GW side. Vellejoe good.. Andrea .. better

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  3. Welcome to the.... light side? As you probably know, I use vallejo almost exclusively (I have some veteran GW left over being phased out and some of their new washes) and quite like them overall. I'm planning to make myself a wet palette this week to save on paint wastage, looks dead simple.

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  4. I'm still on the fence, I've got odd vallejo colours I've used for years, I don't always find them as smooth as I'd like them to be I also find that once out of the pot they can dry really quickly so when I'm painting 5+ minis by the time I get to the last miniature the paints had to be thinned several times just to keep it wet and so it doesn't cover as well.

    Their skin tones are much better than old GW ones so I'll probably keep using those, and some of the model colours are much better camo colours for historicals.

    With the GW ever increasing price and complete revamp it's probably not a bad time make a switch to other paints if ya going to do it.

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  5. The watery paints are probably requiring a good shake, may even be worth removing the dropper and giving it a good stir. As for the two colours being very simular it may be you have not shook them enough. I bought a Russian colour that I did this with. Came out green on first use, wrong colour entirly. But once I realised and gave it a good shake it came out more brown!!!

    Ian

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  6. Have to admit that I was delighted when I got my first batch of Vallejo and slowly moving over completely from GW and Foundry.

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