Warcolours Paints Review Part 1

Currently painters are really spoilt for choice when it comes to buying paints. There are more companies than ever producing paint ranges aimed at gamers and painters than possibly ever before. Something that they all share in common is their fairly high price though (we'll look at this in more detail later) A new company called Warcolours is set to change that though, promising quality at a more reasonable price. I've had my eye on these for a while but decided to finally pick them up and try them out. Currently I use a mix of mostly GW paints (because I owned them first) and an ever increasing supply of P3, Vallejo, Reaper and Scale 75 paints.

While this will be mostly a Warcolour focussed review I will compare them to the other paint brands I have. I might do a full paint comparison article in the future.

Packaging

Warcolours come in a dropper bottle similar to Vallejo/Reaper/Scale 75. The main difference is that Warcolours include a child safety cap, might be useful if you have kids that can reach your hobby area! The bottles are clear with a transparent label with black writing on it. While this is fine on the lighter paints it means it's basically unreadable on dark paints. They could do with a white label for the darker paints! Another thing to note is that the Warcolours pots are made from a much stiffer plastic than other dropper bottles, I found that I had to squeeze them fairly hard (sometimes with both hands) to get the paint out onto the palette. I didn't have any problems with excess paint spurting out but it's something to note.

Price

Now here is the real selling point, and the table below shows you why. (prices taken from websites I buy from. Reviews normally use RRP but I thought it far better to use what prices I actually buy the paints for. Mostly these prices are from Element Games but the Reaper prices are from Miniature Heroes and the Warcolours from their own site (converted from Euros).

Brand	Price	Size	Price per 100ml
Vallejo Model Colour	£2.03	17ml	£11.94
Games Workshop	£1.99	12ml	£16.58
Reaper Master Series	£2.58	15ml	£17.20
Scale 75	£2.48	17ml	£14.59
P3	£2.25	15ml	£15.00
Warcolours	£1.24	15ml	£8.27

Well they certainly win on price! By a considerable margin too. A disclaimer here, Reaper paints are a little harder to find in the UK (I only know of one online retailer that stocks them) so that might explain the slightly higher price. GW's higher price is explained by it being GW ;) Also worth noting is that Warcolours offer 250ml bottles if you know you'll need a lot of one colour. These come in at £10.80 for the 250ml so are excellent value!

Range

No snazzy names here, Warcolours are separated into colours then a number, the higher the number the darker the colour.

I only have the core range and fluorescent range to test today but Warcolours also do a number of other ranges:

Metallics – A range of metallics, from your standard silver, gold etc to more unusual coloured metallics.

Transparent Paints – Designed for 'shading, glazing and colour grading'

Glaze Paints - These seem to be the same as the above range so I'm not sure why they've separated them.

Features

Warcolours boast a range of features that they think help them stand out in the market, these are:

• colours do not separate
• perfect consistency
• smooth paint, no lumping
• brush and airbrush compatible
• child-proof cap
• dropper bottles minimise contamination and drying out risk
• intermixable with other brands

Now some of this is to be expected but there are a few things worth talking about. First of all, colours do not separate. Now I'm sure anyone that owns dropper bottle from companies like Vallejo or Scale 75 knows that despite the advantages that dropper bottles bring, they need some serious shaking before use. I tested this out by leaving my Warcolours on my desk for a week, then opened them and put some paint on my palette with no shaking. To my amazement the claim is correct, no separation at all! They also claim 'perfect consistency' Now I'm not sure exactly what is meant by that, as your target paint consistency will be different depending on what you are doing with it. I assume they mean for base coating you should use it undiluted but this will require some experimenting. 

Join me next week as I put the paints through their paces! Let me know in the comments if you've tried out these paints or any thoughts you have about the other paint ranges out there.