Vallejo Game Color Advanced Acrylic Paint Set - Assorted Colours (Pack of 16)

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Looking to spread your wings and fly from the Citadel Colour nest? Wanting to set foot out of your painting comfort zone? Or just looking for something new to try? You can’t go far wrong with Vallejo. An excellent alternative to most game-brand colour ranges and a solid rung up on the painting ladder, Vallejo’s Game Color range will see you right. Vallejo Game Colour Paints Review – Introduction

Let’s take a look at the washes. These didn’t change very much at all and should be consistent with their old versions, but for some reason, Vallejo removed the green and grey wash, and added a yellow wash instead. While the colours themselves stayed consistent, I did notice that they flow better than the old washes, I heard they switched to a medium based on the new Xpress Color formula. A set of highly pigmented acrylic colours developed for painting fantasy or science fiction miniatures, the Vallejo Game Color Set provides paints that adhere to plastics and metals perfectly, brushing on easily and smoothly and drying to an opaque, matt finish that is waterproof once dry.

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The first is making sure you’ve got a little elbow grease spare – the paints require a lot of shaking to get them to mix to the correct consistency. If you decide that Vallejo are the paints for you, you might want to consider buying yourself a vortex mixer to save your arm. To a degree, the same is true for the bronze paints, which are also rather thin, here I would prefer Runelord Brass and Brass Scorpion. Hammered Copper and Tinny Tin are decent, however, and cover well. I then had a go with another WePrintMiniatures figure: Salome. This time, I tried a basecoat of Scarlet Red and then a top-down highlight of Bloody Red on her cape (and any other part of her figure that happened to get in the way at the time).

But apart from these minor issues, the new Game Color acrylics are amazing, and really feel like next-gen miniature paints that are up there with more pricier paints like ProAcryl or Two Thin Coats. Game Color metallics review Because the consistency of the paint is that much more aqueous, it can be quite difficult to get a decent amount of paint onto the brush for drybrushing. The paint tends towards being too wet and prone to splodging on textures as opposed to leaving a good, crisp highlight. The vast majority of the paints in the range go on as smooth as silk and work excellently with water. This makes them perfect for gradually shifting or building colour on the surface of a miniature. I am very new to airbrushing (I started using one about a week ago and it made me very cross) and, I will confess, I’m also extremely bad at it. The coloured washes on the other hand are very bright compared to their counterparts from Games Workshop or The Army Painter. Especially Yellow Wash, which is almost unusable because the yellow pigment they chose is so light that you can hardly see the wash even over white primer. Red, blue and purple are ok, but the red and blue washes are also very bright, so they are only suitable for shading really light colours, which limits their usefulness. Game Color Inks review

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This compact range has been especially developed to contain all the frequently used colours in fantasy figures, in a formula particularly designed for adherence on plastics and metals, using a new resin of unequalled durability and resistance to scrapes and abrasion. Colours brush on easily and smoothly, and dry to an opaque, matte finish. Their finely ground texture makes them perfect for the most miniature details as well as for large surfaces. They are highly pigmented, light fast and waterproof once dry. Errors can be corrected immediately with water or a small amount of alcohol.

Something to note with the range if you are a long-time Citadel user looking to shake things up are that many of the colours are equitable to Citadel paints, so you needn’t worry about having to change from one paint scheme to another mid-army, or some of your figures not quite matching the other. The Washes and Inks, developed with a new resin, are used for shadows and for the application of colors in layers. When applied over a basecoat, they enter into the folds and grooves of the figure, and instantly brings forth the features. They can also be mixed with the regular colors, or with the Mediums. Last but not least, we have a few additives, like a metallic medium which is basically white metallic particles you can mix into other paints to give them a metallic sheen. There is also an airbrush thinner and glaze medium, as well as four varnishes from glossy to ultra matt.On the base of the figure above, you can see where the paint has smeared on the base, as opposed to applying properly. As you may suspect, though, there are certain paints within the range that are better at being drybrushed than others.

The red did not go on as well. The reds in the Game OClour range strike me as being exceptionally watery, so getting them a good consistency for airbrushing is difficult. You’ll need to use the smallest amount of thinner you can, and then gradually add small, individual drops of red to get the consistency just right. I was, however, pleasantly surprised by the whites and light greys in the Game Color range. White can be a bit hit and miss, either being too watery or too clumpy. Vallejo’s whites and light greys – Wolf Grey, Ghost Grey, Arctic White and Dead White – are excellent. I then swapped in a more familiar-looking Games Workshop figure (a Lord-Imperatant from the new AoS 3.0 ranges) to test out some of the metallic paints. I found the metallic paints actually went through the airbrush and onto a figure very well. Given how good Vallejo’s Metal Color Airbrush range is, this shouldn’t really have been a surprise. And that was the complete new Game Color range in fast forward, except for the 24 Xpress Colors, which I have reviewed in a separate review.

The good thing about Vallejo’s Game Color range is that they work fairly well with airbrushes – so much so that even a complete airbrushing novice like me can appreciate them. I noted above that, on the whole, paints in the Game Color range are quite thin. Whilst this makes certain techniques more difficult, a thinner consistency to a paint does make the non-metallic paints ideal for airbrushing. The new Game Colors should already be available from our partner shops Wayland Games, Element Games, Firestorm Games, and Taschengelddieb, which all have them at an additional discount. In spite of knowing this, in a moment of madness, I decided to have a go at some OSL on one of the figures I was testing with – I couldn’t look at the fireball in her hand and not feel as if there should be some light on her. I seriously struggled to do this, not only due to my inexperience with OSL (this was the first time I’d ever attempted it) but also because I really struggled to get the paints to do what I wanted to on the figure. I am really disappointed with the gold colours, though. Shining Gold and Glorious Gold are not only thin but weak, and need quite a few coats to cover. By now, we have many better options for gold paints, and I recommend Retributor Armour, as well as Duncan Rhode’s Two Thin Coats and ProAcryl golds, which just cover so much better.