Reply To: Contrast Paints, is everyone really using them and are they actually quicker?

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I’ve been a big fan of contrast paints and use them across all genres I paint.  One of the biggest surprises I had was how much I liked using it to paint horses for my Napoleonic French.  Especially Black contrast paint.  Initially I thought having that in black would be kind of pointless.  But if you use it over white primer it really brings out the detail and gives the higher areas a very dark grey highlight.  Which saves me time when painting regiments.  I also discovered that Leviadon Blue contrast dry brushed with Caledor Sky gave me a pretty satisfying blue for my French Old Guard coats.

Then there is the White contrast that I’ve started using as more of a wash over detailed white objects.  Snakebite leather makes convincing wood effects on ships too and I have used that through out my French fleet.  Flesh Tearer Red seems to work well for deep red roman cloaks and tunics.  The ability to just put on one coat and save myself the inking/shading process has sped up my assembly line painting noticeably.  Which may also be where these paints shine.

The net net seems that it takes a lot of experimenting to figure out where these paints actually save time.  I certainly have colors that I picked up thinking they would be great and never ended up using.  The yellows and greens for instance I find really disappointing.  But that could be just cause of what I paint with them.  Everyone gets a dose of Guilliman’s Flesh over their base flesh tone now and I don’t bother dry brushing afterwards.  I’ve been able to churn more skeletons in a day then I ever imagined I could with Skeleton Horde.