I came home to a new parcel this evening and inside was my Army Painter Speedpaints…

Now as I had some teeny Imperials to paint I thought I would give these a go on those. Meaning I test the paint as well as paint something I needed painting.

There were some useful colours for what I am doing with the Imperials…

They come in the Dropper bottles, now unless you have been living under a stone then you will know this already. This set also came with a free paint brush, which isn’t much use for 6mm miniatures as it is pretty big. The box also came with the usual AP painting leaflet and another one just on the Speedpaints.

So evidently I shake the bottle, complete with a pair of agitation  balls, and then remove the liquid from the top. I then shake it again to mix up the rest of the paint…here I met my first problem, the paint was there not some semi translucent medium. So I dropped some onto my high tech pallette…

I started with the red, as you can see from the tissue, there was no medium. So I did a bit of a drop from the bottle and frankly painted red on every six millimetre miniature I had undercoated. To be honest this was a concern of mine, there is the potential for a lot of waste. As you can see the other colours are a lot smaller in my pot.

With a bit of trial and error I got the hang of how much I needed, I still ended up nearly painting two units with the tiny pools of paint. Now the one thing I noticed was that these started to dry pretty quickly on my temporary palette.

The paint went on pretty much like the Contrast… I say pretty much as at this scale it is blobbed on…well it is by me. I will give something a bit bigger a go at a later date.

The colours seemed fine to be honest apart from the dark grey which didn’t really cover much, perhaps it needed a bloody good shake. The leather cover was all over the lid even after a quick shake. It wasn’t as dark as the Contrast leather colour, but it was still okay though. I actually like the purple more than the GW versions.

So what does it look like …

Speedpaints on the left and Contrast on the right. Both sides painted as badly as the other 😉.

So for my initial thoughts…

Cost wise ten pots of paint and a brush for £33.99, so just under £3.40 per pot.even less if you take a couple of quid off for a brush… Compare this to GW at £5.75 a pot on island – down to £5.25 on Amazon, but there is still a big saving

Coverage… at 6mm I am not noticing any difference apart from the colours mentioned above. More likely user error than the actual paint, but time shall tell.

There is loads of hype out there by various Youtubers waxing lyrical about how much better the Speedpaints are… they got sent free copies, I even offered to buy a couple of pots to test, but was told they had run out and I would have to wait, obviously my little blog wasn’t big enough for them.

Upon saying this, I am trying to be a bit more even handed as I spent my hard earned cash on them myself so have no feelings either way. I was going to buy a box to try, I just wanted to start trying them earlier.

So where do I stand. Price is good, way cheaper than GW Contrast paint.

Dropper bottles, for this style of paint is a big pain in the neck for me. I reckon I am going to waste a fair bit either through drying out or through putting too much on a palette. Once I printed my CONTRAST pot support, then I haven’t spilled a drop. It is so much easier taking it off the lid than dropping it onto a plate or something. The other annoying bloody thing with the Dropper bottles is paint splurge… this is where half the pot ends up in the lid when you shake it.

Ease of purchase. As you can imagine, living on an island sort of limits where I can get things from. We do have a shop that stocks GW paints, so I can easily pick up a new pot of Contrast. At present anything else is bought online, which can be a pain at times.

I am going to actually have to sit on the fence on this one. There are some advantages and disadvantages for both ranges, to be brutally honest though, if GW dropped their price then I don’t think I would actually even bother with the Speedpaints… so I suppose technically I have sort of sat on the Gw side of the fence for the time being.

Once I have had a proper play then I will see what I think, one concern I do have is that whe you go over the speedpaints then they reactivate… something to consider as well as have a play about with…