I first saw this product on FB a
few months ago. I am guessing it is their answer to Citadel's Contrast
Paints. Speed Paint seems to be in between regular acrylic paint and
washes. Being thicker than a wash the paint will tint a painting area, while at
the same time being thin enough, it will gather into the recesses creating some
shadows. The whole trick is to use the speed paint over a matte white primer or
some other light color. It was even tried over a light metallic with some
interesting positive results.
When finally released it came as
two choices, the Starter pack Comes with 10 paints in dropper bottles, which
included a stainless steel mixing ball in the bottle. AP also includes a paint
brush. They create their own names for their brushes, so there is no number but
to me it looks like a slightly stubby No. 2 brush. But this is what you need.
The Speed Paint needs to go on fairly thick.
Alternatively, you can get the
Mega-pack which contains 23 paints (plus Speed Paint Medium). This set gives
you a few choices of red, green, blue and brown, rather than just one choice
with the starter set. It also comes with a how-to booklet, the same No. 2
brush and mixing ball. I got the Mega set through Amazon, and that seller
included a small container of AP foliage - lichen of 3 different colors.
All of this for $99. A bit more expensive than buying regular paint, but the
huge PRO is it's supposed to take care of 3 different paints - base coat, highlight
and shadow.
Picking out my figure, I didn't
want to waste the paint (or my time if things went bad) by painting a large
figure. So a 32mm figure was the victim.
I missed the first recommendation
that the paints should go on a hard palette and not a wet palette. The reason
is to keep the paint from soaking thru the paper into the sponge. But as I use
parchment paper, and had no bleed thru.
I wasn't really concerned with historical
accuracy of the Viking. I just wanted to see how many colors I could use and
what they looked like.
I decided to put out one color at a
time and came up with my first annoyance: I was surprised how most colors,
directly out of the bottle, is VERY dark. It was hard to tell whether that
puddle was brown, blue, or green. This is where the hard palette, the type with
little cups pays off.
All the colors did what they said
they were going to do -kept the highlights bright while darkening the shadows.
Any excess puddles can be reabsorbed with the paintbrush to avoid "tide
marks." When I painted and didn't like the color, I flooded the area
with water and easily wiped the still wet paint away. I dried the area and then
put down the new color.
Each paint bottle has a triad
shield image on it. That's not a design but indicates how dark multiple layers
will look. The first Con occurred when I didn't allow the first coat to fully
dry before adding a second. It is in the how-to that the new coat will
reactivate the first one and you will get a mess. You NEED to let each layer
dry and will see this on the front of my Viking. It's rather messy in the
front.
You can really see how well the
base/ highlight/shadows work on the wooden shield though. In the end, I got
carried away and added a little silver here and there to the figure.Regular
acrylic paint goes over a dried Speed Paint with no problem
I think this is a very good
product; especially for the modelers who build armor, or aviation (any model
with a figure) and don't really want to take the time to learn to paint
figures. The only situation where this may not work out for someone is if the
modeler is a real stickler for accuracy. The shad of blue you want may not be
the shade of blue they have. But if you think as long as it's close I'm
good, then this is for you. I'm guessing that if and when the line takes
off, they will add more colors. But remember you can always add regular paint
too.
Two thumbs up from me. Being this
is a B&W newsletter, the color images can be found here:
http://kevtk.blogspot.com/2022/04/trying-army-painters-speed-paint.html