A tale of two pigments

In the end I didn't paint a squad in a mix of paints. Instead, I painted two squads, one in hobby paint and one in craft paints. The comparisons in colour between the pots and tubes were close, but different enough that they would look odd in the same squad.

For the basic coats I used GW Foundation Tausept Ochre and Folkart Yellow Ochre - quite different in level of pigment, and it took two coats of Folkart where I only needed a single coat of GW over black primer. Probably not a fair comparison since that's the whole point of the foundation paints... so let me ignore that one.

The other colours were a fairer comparison. My biggest complaint is the texture of the craft paints. The actual pigment levels were very similar between the two types of paint directly from the pot/tube, but the consistency of the craft paints was rather glutinous. In some of the colours, it was as though the manufacturer had sneezed repeatedly into the mix; the consistency  was almost like white (PVA) glue.

What this meant was that I needed much more thinning to make the hobby paints workable, which obviously reduced the opacity and then led to my needing two coats of most colours to get an even coverage (honourable mention for gray here).

Overall, I have seen enough to prove to myself that hobby paints are better than craft paints for the way that I paint. Craft paints may work for you, and the end results are decent enough, but I will go back to hobby paints from now on.

Oh - and if you're wondering, the upper picture is craft paints and the lower picture is my usual hobby paints...

The quality of paint is not strained...

I was listening to one of my regular diet of podcasts in the car the other day (Meeples and Miniatures, episode 65 - http://meeples.wordpress.com/) where Neil was talking about painting figures. There was a discussion about paint and preparation, and one of the comments was that neither he nor his co-presenter would ever use craft paint other than for scenery.

Which got me to thinking... it may not be as good as hobby acrylics (GW, Vallejo, PP, Foundry or whatever), but is it 'good enough' for rank and file? I have certainly used odd colours in the past, and I will admit that I still use craft acrylics to touch up spray undercoats where the can misses undercuts. So I dropped into Hobbycraft on the way home from the office and I picked up five tubes of FolkArt acrylic (http://direct.hobbycraft.co.uk/productdetail.asp?productcatalogue=246194) which were as close as I could match by memory to the colours I'm using for my Imperial Guard.

What I will do is to assemble and undercoat my next squad as usual (a veteran squad of GW Cadians with Pig Iron heads and backpacks) and then paint five using my usual paints and five using the cheap craft paints. Both batches will get a Devlan Mud wash, and then I'll see whether I can tell the difference. And I'll post the pictures so you can compare them too.