Army Painter - A Quick Product Review

I was reading a product review of the Army Painter product range on another blog the other day (I forget which!) and decided to give it a try. For those who haven't heard of Army Painter, its a company that manufactures spray primers in a wide variety of colours, as well as other useful painting gubbins! The two products that I decided to purchase were the Spray Primer Desert Yellow, and the Quickshade: Strong Tone. I wanted to try and use these products to speed up the painting process for my Elysians. Although i do own an airbrush, i find using it is not always as straight forward as it seems, and problems frequently occur.

Firstly, the spray primer. Well, it does exactly what it says on the tin! Its simply a spray paint of your chosen colour, of which Army Painter offers a large range. Instead of undercoating, then base coating your models, this product does it in one spray. Nice, neat, and simple.

The second product is Quickshade. This is a product designed for shading your models by dipping them straight into the pot of Quickshade! The product comes in three strengths, and i went for the middle one, Strong Tone. Now, I've never been a fan of "dipping" but the results were quite convincing. The Quickshade is also a gloss varnish, eliminating another stage of your painting process. The only problem with this is that you may not want a gloss varnish on your models. I know i certainly don't! However, the gloss effect can be countered with the application of a Matt Varnish over the top (I used the GW one) This effectively gives you a double layer of varnish, hopefully making your models more durable.

The Quickshade is meant to be used once all of your base colours are on the model. I guess the highlights can be added before or after the Quickshade, this down to personal preference. Once the model is dipped, you must shake or wipe off the excess. If you don't you will get localised areas of very strong shading, which can look a bit rubbish!

To see the results for myself, i used an old 1st Ed Space Hulk Genestealer! I'm not quite brave enough to crack on straight away with my beloved Forgeworld models! The pictures below show the model after being sprayed with Primer and then dipped in the Quickshade. In this example, I'm very happy with the result! I have some more squads arriving tomorrow, both Elysian and Krieg (see my other blog for the Kreig!), so i hope to apply these products for real soon!

I hope this has been helpful to you all, and i strongly recommend you check out Army Painters website and take a look! Enjoy!