Friday, May 15, 2015

Vallejo vs GW paints

While selecting paints for today's painting session, I was thinking in GW paints - even though I own a range of Vallejo colors. Here's a rant explaining why.

When I started miniature painting, I didn't own any paints (or models, for that matter). All painting was done at my local gaming shop. They owned a range of old GW paints (and a couple of Vallejo colors), which I've exploited to full extent. Later on, I started watching painting tutorials on YouTube. They obviously work with newer paints, so I was pretty confused for a while, not knowing that GW switched the naming of their entire range fairly recently. So, being accustomed to GW paints, why would I order Vallejo colors and how on Earth do I manage knowing which is which?

Answer 1a. Maths.
On http://elementgames.co.uk/, a pot of GW paint (12 ml) is £1.99, while a 17 ml bottle of Vallejo paint is £1.98.
Answer 1b. Containers.
GW paint comes in pots, which tend to dry out really fast. A lot of paint sticks to the cap/side of the pot, which dries up even faster and gets wasted. Vallejo paints, on the other hand, come in dropper bottles, preventing this. The other difference is that you can't reach with your brush into the bottle. This prevents you from picking up very small amounts of paint (bad) and accidentally mixing other colors into your paint (good).

Answer 2.
So when painting Daemonettes, I hear on YouTube of Daemonette Hide (new GW designation), which I know to be and can visualize as Hormagaunt Purple (old GW designation), which this chart shows me is Heavy Violet (Vallejo) which I own. Simple as that!

P.S. If you google "gw vs vallejo", you'll get several pages of forums with people discussing this matter from various perspectives, including quality. I'm not an expert painter, nor do I make a living out of this. So it really doesn't matter if one is more heavily pigmented, or flows easier, or whatever. I made my choice entirely based on the "answers" above.

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