In any case, one major decision is whether to use oil paints or acrylic paints. Oil paints usually have fuller pigmentation and a thicker consistency than oil paints. They blend well and have a long drying time, which means painters don’t need to work very quick, since the paint can rest on their palettes longer without drying up and becoming useless. I used to absolutely love Humbrol, since that line had (and still has) a lot of different available colours. Since the late nineties, it has a Super Enamel line, which uses an ‘improved formula’. Testor’s Enamel and ModelMaster ranges are excellent as well, providing a wide variety of colours and nice alcohol-based metal finishes. However, the Humbrol lids were extremely difficult to handle and they often needed to be pried loose. Also, oil paints need to be thinned with turpentine or similar products. These fluids are generally bad for your health and also melt plastic. On top of that, the Testor paints seemed to dry quicker than the Humbrol ones, making them more unsuitable for advanced painting techniques. I still like the glossy finishes provided by enamel paints, but, at least for now, the battle seems to have been won by acrylic paints. Acrylics dry faster, but they can be thinned with water and several other liquids (like matte acrylic paint without pigmentation). This means they are easier to handle. Also, the cleaning process isn’t as hard on the brushes.
I, myself, am an amateur model painter, so I invited two of my experienced colleagues to come over and work on some models with me. These guys often paint the minis we get for reviewing purposes and I used some of their valuable input in this text. A few years back, we reviewed Vallejo Gaming Color paints in our magazine, Cerberus Too. I absolutely loved the paints back then, especially because of the nice colour variations, but, after a while, I discovered they had some disadvantages, the main one being their dropper-style lids. These are extremely handy, but after a while, they do tend to clog. Sometimes, the result is an exploding paint bottle, with way too much paint ejected all at once.
Comparing the P3 Formula with only one kind of model paint seemed a little restrictive, though, so my colleagues brought Vallejo Model Color, Tamya Acrylic and both the old and new Games Workshop Color ranges to work with.
Vallejo Gaming Color: This range has a lot of different colours available and has a rich pigmentation. They can be used ‘as is’, without thinning, which is a major advantage. Also, they have very rich pigmentation, which means they can be watered down quite easily without losing a lot of consistency. Vallejo Paints use a different binder than the other acrylic paints, with a particulate pigment suspended in an acrylic fluid. Vallejo Model Colors: Thicker versions than the Gaming Colors. They are generally a little less bright and better suited for historical war gaming and gamers who like more realistic colour schemes. The grain is pretty rough and these colours don’t water down very easily.
Games Workshop Colours: Contrary to Vallejo paints, Games Workshop Paints do need to be thinned if a nice finish is needed. The range of colours is good, but the coverage often has a tendency to suffer when these paints are thinned too much. Games Workshop Paints do offer some of the best metallic colours available. The old range had containers with flip-tops. These were pretty cheap, but the small tabs in front sometimes broke and the hinges had a tendency to rip after a while. However, the new screw tops may be the most hated lids ever.
Tamiya Acrylics: Despite being fairly thin, these paints have a good pigmentation and cover well. Unfortunately, this range hasn’t got a whole lot of colours to choose from.
We tested the paints on a few old Void 1.1 models we had lying around. Void 1.1 always was a good game and we wanted to try out the formula on miniatures other than Iron Kingdoms or Warmachine models.
The first thing we noticed was the lid design. The lids look a lot like the old Games Workshop ones and are opened by pulling a plastic tab. After some research, we discovered that this is no coincidence: the paint pots are made my the same manufacturers as the old GW pots. However, the lids do seem to be a little stronger than the GW ones, so this design seems to be an excellent choice. As long as the inside rim is kept clean, the containers should be shut pretty tight, which is a good thing. All of the lids are white, as are the labels, so colours need to be distinguished by the colour of the pots or the name printed in black on the labels.
Upon release in November 2006, only 6 boxed sets of 6 colours each were available, but the range has been greatly expanded recently. It now includes 64 paint colours and 8 inks and washes and the range will also get its own brushes and other utensils and accessories. This should be enough for most purposes.
The Iron Kingdoms Core Colors boxed set includes the colours Pig Iron, Morrow White, Thamar Black, Rhulic Gold, Bootstrap Leather and Midlund Flesh. This is not enough to work with, so a second boxed set will be needed in order to be able to paint a single group of miniatures, but some of the paints definitely have a distinctive look. The metallic colours in particular certainly look very realistic and also have a worn quality about them. All of the colours share enough similarities to the ones available in other paint ranges to compare all of these different paints with each other, however.
Upon opening the lids, we noticed that the surface tension of the liquid was pretty high, looking more elastic than the other paints we were using. Indeed, the P3 Formula consistency is high. These paints are a little rubbery, slimy, and very smooth, but not watery. For most purposes, we had to water them down, but this is when we discovered one of the greatest strengths of these paints: even when we used quite a lot of water, the coverage didn’t suffer all that much. In fact, we noticed that even the highly watered-down Morrow White and Midlund Flesh still covered our models better than most of the other paints! We like grey and black undercoats, but black often keeps showing through the first layers of paint. With the Formula P3 paints, we didn’t encounter this problem, and after only 3 thin layers of watered-down Formula P3 colours, we didn’t see any of the black coming through.
Mixing the colours with each other also gleaned excellent results. We were able to make the finished layers look as opaque as we wanted. We only needed to use water and never had to resort to the thinners or drying retarders we had to use with most of the other colours, except for the Vallejo Gaming Color range. Using these paints as washes was a little tougher, since the pigment strength is so high that a lot of water needs to be used. Some of the other paints actually performed better, until we started to use even more water than we expected the Formula P3 colours could handle. Still, the washes in this range will probably be better suited for this kind of work.
However, this advantage also has a downside, as dry brushing isn’t as easy as highlighting when using these paints. The pigment strength and consistency is so good that we had a lot of trouble applying this technique without making the layers look too smooth and filling up gaps we didn’t want to fill up. Softer brushes seemed to work a lot better, though, so painters may want to keep different kinds of brushes on hand. It may be a good idea to have some Vallejo Model Color paints on hand, as we found the combination between P3 Formula layers and highlights and Vallejo Model Color dry brushing worked very well indeed. Details were easy to apply using Formula P3 paints exclusively, though.
Besides being able to be watered down a lot, Formula P3 turned out to have another major advantage: while the other paints on our palettes had already dried up, the Formula P3 colours were still usable! Painters who work very fast may not find this very interesting, but I myself need a lot of time to paint a single miniature and I also often forget the combination of colours I have used very easily. Oil paints generally dry up a lot slower, but, compared to the other acrylic paints on hand, Formula P3 colours definitely got the upper hand. Impressive stuff, even though exact drying times will vary according to the lighting used.
All in all, when compared to the paints we listed above, the Formula P3 range seems to be the most versatile. The strong pigmentation, excellent consistency even after being watered down a lot and high drying times combine to make a great range of paints. To get the most out of the Formula P3 paints, we recommend adding some of the Vallejo colours and we would probably buy the washes as well, but we can’t know for sure yet as we haven’t been able to review those. If you only buy one range of paints and stick to them, the Formula P3 range seems to be the best choice. Highly recommended!
Dirk Vandereyken
With help from The Reaver & Ultradox.
