"Experiences with craft paints?" Topic

I'm looking at beginning to use craft paints (Apple Barrel, Americana, Folk Art, Creamcoat, ?Color Scheme? [Michael's house brand]) & am curious about others experiences with them. Are there any that you highly recommend or any that you'd definately avoid?

Thanks

I use them fairly often. They don't have as much pigment as some of the better paints, but in many cases they tend to work fine. I use them quite a bit with washes/stain painting. I would estimate about half of my painting is done with these, another sizeable fraction with Liquitex acrylics and some fraction with vallejo (sp?), reaper, ironwind/old ral partha. What craft paints do not seem to have are decent metallics at least not that I can find. Buy a couple and play with them to see if they suit your painting style. If you pick colors that would be useful for terrain even if you don't like them for figures at least they wont be wasted.

Rich

I use them a fair amount – especially for browns, where I like a lot of variety. I agree with Rich that the metallics don't seem to be very good on any of the craft brands I have tried.

They are particularly useful for painting buildings and terrain – they are very much cheaper than any of the modelling brands.

I use them a lot, especially for the colours you use often (greens, browns, red, grey, black, blue, etc). I use Dala (a South African make) and they have quite a large range. They even have mettallics, though I haven't tried them yet.

What I like about them is that they are cheap, readily available and don't go off like the Humbrols often do. They also dry quickly and take a coat of varnish well.

I've used some of the metallics on other things, but not miniatures. I think they might work well. Generally I only use craft paint on terrain though. Reaper paints always seemed a lot like craft paints to me, so if you like those try it! I suggest a test model first however.

Here is a question that comes up quite often. I wish we had a quick-reference section for supplies. Most everyone agrees that there are some good values in craft paint. Ceramcoat is generally regarded as the best of the lot, but you will find useful colors in all the lines you name. Remember that expensive pigments are yellow and red, so don't expect much from them. (you get what you pay for). I have found the exception to the above comments about metallics. I use Aleen's Premium Coat metallics. They have a good strong pigment. I mix most of my metals using either gold or silver as a base.

I use Americana paints a lot now and am very pleased with the effects. Not great for wood colours though.

For metallics I have a very good gold – Anita's Metallics Antique Gold and my favourite Bronze is Liquitex iridescent bronze which is absolutely essential when painting any ancient figure before 200 BC. (Unfortunately it is running out and my usual supplier has dropped the range!)

I think the Apple barrel paints are lower in quality than Americana, Folk Art and Delta Cream Coat.

I have trouble getting a good red with them, but i actually find the yellow to be excellent. It covers extremely well and builds up very distinctly as 'HELLO MY NAME IS YELLOW!' over a darker sienna kind of color.

I would definatly recomend all the brands listed.

I have used most of the brands above. Currently I use nothing but craft paints. They work well as paints and, when watered down, as inks for me. All my WHFB, 40k, Starship Troopers and other minis that I've painted have craft paint jobs.

I use Americana for large areas; several of the colours are good matches for Vallejo (so I can use those for the detailed bits). They don't always cover brilliantly, but they're cheap and cheerful and get big jobs done – especially for things like terrain and basing and so on.

Greys and browns are good, the darker greens and "mucky" shades seem OK. I've not really tried reds or yellows or any of the brighter colours.

FolkArt 914 Light Red Oxide is the best red I've ever found. I'm moving towards craft paints as my only choice.

Heres what I've been doing for the yellow I'm so happy with (it pops on 10mm figures which is big for me).

This is after a brown wash over the whole figure

1) Americana 'Terra Cotta'
2) Delta Creamcoat 'Antique Gold' Semi Opaque (this is non metallic mind you)
3) Americana 'Primary yellow' or Delat C ream Coat 'Citrus'

if you want you can mix some white in for a real bright color.

Definatly powerfull stuff.

I'll look into that Light Red Oxide, sounds just the trick.

Also Delta Cream Coat 'Phthalo Blue' comes highly recomended by myself, very vibrant and rich.

I use Delta mostly for terrain. I do d use the black to cover points which the priming missed. Lots of guys use them to paint the models but I use Foundry and Vallejo. I find them hit or miss for figures and the toys are too expensive for that now.

I use all of the major brands mentioned and have done so for years. However, I use craft paints 99% of the time on terrain projects, not on miniatures. Very, very rarely I will use a craft color to cover a large area of a miniature where it won't kill detail or obscure it. I have used craft paints for base colors on things like giants or large creatures, in order to save my more expensive miniature paints. But I only do this sparingly, and you have to be careful not to fill in detail on a figure when using craft paints.

The whites and off-whites and browns and greens and yellows from Apple Barrel are absolutely fantastic for painting large areas of terrain boards, where you need to paint a base color before putting texturing over it. Those colors are also excellent for mixing and applying to things like roads and rivers on terrain boards. They blend well and dry very, very quickly so you can do highlighting over base colors fast.

The antique whites and tan colors and yellows can be used effectively for applying base colors to medieval structures, the plaster areas on half-timbered houses. The browns are excellent for detailing and highlighting timbers.

I have used blacks grays and whites for years and years to paint rocks and rock formations made out of insulation board foam. Craft paints cover insulation foam very well. Two coats give a good solid color over even bright pink insulation board.

The best thing about craft paints is that they are user friendly – fast drying, water cleanup, and you can cover large areas of terrain with relatively low expense.

Mike

It's also useful to mention that craft paints make excellent substitutes for terrain where things like Games Workshop colors are involved.

If you make fantasy terrain for wargames you know what I'm talking about – White Dwarf Magazine happily tells you to paint an entire terrain board or base for a forest wood piece with "Bubonic Brown, and dry brush with Bleached Bone"! As if you're going to go out and actually purchase 100 bottles of each paint color to paint terrain!! I have always found that so ridiculous, as much as I love Games Workshop and the stuff their talented folks make. To their credit, they DO mention a couple times in their terrain books about their terrain staff at the workshop going out and getting large volumes of paint made to match GW colors, but more often they simply say to paint terrain in a specific GW color, with the implication that you should do it straight from the tiny miniature bottle.

Of course, one can certainly go out to a paint store and get quart or gallon cans of GW colors matched and custom-made to match those colors, so you have the volume required for terrain projects. But I have found that with a little thought and care, you can find and effectively utilize all those colors and more in the craft paint section of any dept. store or craft store.

Mike

I have used some with good results and some that just would not coat. I knew a guy that did all of his painting with those type paints and they came out very well. So you can get good results out of them.

Me, I find it is an experiment to find out each time if the color is going to work.

I use craft paints almost exclusively on my 6mm troops over a black base and have almost no problems (yellow is weak sometimes). I do find that model paints (Vallejo, for example) are a bit nicer to dillute into a wash (e.g., over microarmour)--the model paints seem to have finer bits of pgment and make for a smoother wash (whatever the technical explanation of that is). I haven't noticed major differences between brands.

I once picked up some Anita's paints on offer, but it turned out to be a bit of a false economy. Great matt finish, but in my experience they were just too poorly pigmented to be quick and useful for mini painting.

Campaigner1: GW Belfast made a new, bigger desert table for Apocalypse, a month or two ago. I watched in morbid fascination as they emptied pot after pot of bubonic brown onto a sheet of newspaper, for drybrushing (with a brush, not the newspaper).

I have enjoyed using the Delta, Americana, and Aleen's brands. Accent makes metallics that we like to use. Sometimes you need two coats, but they aren't nearly as coarse as GW metals.

I'd stay away from the Plaid brand. I found them to have the least amount of pigment.

Also, look for bottles of brush cleaner, gloss and matte coat, and blending gel by the same makers.

Ceramcoat is my favorite craft paint. Americana is next. I dislike Folk Art and have been phasing it out. I bought a bunch of the AC Moore house brand on a 3/$1 sale. After trying to paint with them, I tossed them all in the trash, all 20+ bottles. Not enough pigment even out of the bottle. Won't even work for scenery. Same for Plaid.

I do dilute craft paint. I also use a wet pallet.

For flesh I use nothing other than Privateer Press P3 paints. Never go cheap on flesh paint. Everyone looks at faces first.

Americana is great, and so are most of the others. Would better paints get you better results? To be brutally honest, not at the skill level at which I paint! I tried some better paints and found they didn't do a thing for me.

The ONLY thing I liked were the better flesh tones (CPBelt is right) and the whites, for when I need control to do eyes and shirt cuffs.

My advice is simple: Buy a bunch of colors you like and just start painting. As you improve you'll decide to invest in a few bottles of Vallejo or other quality paints, and you can use them as you "grow into" them.

Also, for metalics, I use metallic leaf. I love the pure look of silver and gold leafs so much that I don't even mind keeping a dedicated brush or having to use mineral spirits for clean up.

The slightly lower quality/quantity of some pigments can lead to interesting work-arounds, however. I have a set of GW Eldar Fire Dragons that are blindingly red, a state attained by using a rather pink but otherwise quite solid craft paint topped by GW's Red Ink. This particular shade of dark pink is unduplicated in GW colors, but made for the best undercoat for red ink I've ever found.

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Hope this helps.

CC