Army Painter Speedpaint 2.0 Mega Paint Set Review

By Travis Pasch | March 13th, 2023 | Categories: Army Painter, painting miniatures, Space Marines, Tabletop Gaming News, Videos, Warhammer 40k

In the Army Painter Speedpaint 2.0 Mega Paint Set review video, Rob breaks down everything you need to know about the paints!

The new set has a new formula and expanded the line greatly. While this has some colors from the first run, every color has been updated with the new formula.

Rob will show you all the new colors in the mega set, focus on some of the metallics, talk about how the latest formulation works, and how to paint some minis! Let’s check it out!

Army Painter Speedpaint 2.0 Reactivation, Metallics & Review

To start, let’s check out the three new Speedpaint box sets they have available.

SPEEDPAINT COMPLETE SET 2.0+: $379

PRE-ORDER PROMO: Get the Speedpaint Complete Set 2.0 PLUS an exclusive Speedpaint Brush with ergonomic triangular handle and a Hard Plastic Palette – FREE!

The mecca of one-coat paint solution sets, the Speedpaint Complete Set features every Speedpaint colour in existence! That includes all 23 original colours, 42 newly developed colours, 10 Speedpaint Metallics – AND – 12 colours designed by Dana Howl, Watch It Paint It, and Goobertown Hobbies of our Paint Development Team! The set also includes an extra-large 100ml bottle of Speedpaint Medium.

Using an innovative resin medium that flows perfectly over your miniatures, Speedpaints create an unparalleled painting solution to help you get more time for gaming.

SPEEDPAINT METALLICS SET 2.0+: $42.99

PRE-ORDER PROMO: Get the Speedpaint Metallics Set 2.0 PLUS an exclusive Speedpaint Brush – FREE!

Our revolutionary new Speedpaints Metallics are the easiest way to get metallic effects on your miniatures in one simple application. Speedpaint Metallics are the hobby’s first-ever metallic one-coat painting solution, and this paint set is the fastest way to get your hands on all ten! With colours ranging from rich Talos Bronze, to shimmering Broadsword Silver, and glimmering Hoplite Gold – you have the perfect metallic selection for your hordes of plate mail, carapace, and armour.

Army Painter Speedpaint Mega Set 2.0: $199

It’s always cool to get more paints, and you can grab these all at once now! At this price, they break down to about $4 each, which is pretty solid for this many paints.

Remember that you can pre-order this now, but it will be released on April 22nd. This is also the box we’ll look at in the rest of the video.

Mega Set Unboxing:

You get a good range of colors in this set, and with the three metallics, you’ll probably be able to paint up most armies!

It is hard to tell the difference between the two bottles (version one and two) just from the outside. That might make it a little hard for some people to tell what version they have, just something to keep in mind.

Do these Reactivate?

Well, what might be on everyone’s minds is does the new Speedpaint 2.0 reactivate? The quick answer is no! They took the community feedback from the first paint and changed the formulas.

However, considering when Rob painted up this Space Marine with the first run of the paint, he only did one coat, he never really saw the issue, as they were initially meant for a one-coat solution.

The new paint is even better about it. Rob painted this about two hours before his video and was already able to paint on top of it with other colors and had no issues. He also forgot to seal the mini and was handling it with any matte coat whatsoever.

He also painted up some other miniatures and bits to see if he could get the paint to reactivate.

You can see from the timer he painted these about two hours prior and actually took a wet brush to the paints. Luckily, they didn’t reactivate at all! So, if you wait a little while, you’ll be good to go and can paint over it with whatever you want.

Rob actually found that in his atmospheric conditions of about 50% humidity and a temperature of about 60 degrees the new speed paint dried in about 20 minutes.

From there, you can put a second coat on top. So, just give yourself some time, and you’ll be good to go.

Overall, the new paints are much more vibrant and seem to pick out more detail. They aren’t so different that you can’t use the lines together; the new ones (on the bottom) just seem to look better.

Army Painter Speedpaint 2.0 Review: The Metallics

For this style of metallics, he did a zenithal highlight with silver over a black primer and painted with the regular Speed Paint colors from the bits sprues above (just to see how they compare with the new metallics). As you can see, they aren’t that vibrant, so when working with metallics, you want a lighter undercoat.

This is how the metallics look just over a white zenithal undercoat (the right two are flesh colors). So, reasonably vibrant but not quite the same three-dimensional depth as the color Speedpaints. The “speed” part seems to be the ease at which they apply over miniatures, while still having some depth to them.

How to Paint With Speed Paint 2.0

As you can see, the brighter your undercoat, the more vibrant your colors. He used a slap-chop method with a white drybrush over black primer for the top bits. It’s a cool look, but keep in mind it won’t be as vibrant as a normal white airbrush zenithal or even a full white primer like the bottom set of bits.

When you’re doing a zenithal or slap-chop, you want to go as bright as possible for the 2.0 Speedpaints.

The next thing to keep in mind, the new paints are lighter (as you can see on the marine on the left). He did the methods pretty much the same on both, but the newer paints set for him in about 20 minutes, so you have less time to work with them.

However, this gives you more options to basecoat to get a better look.

With that in mind, there are two main methods to use before applying Speedpaint. The first is using an airbrush (or spray can) and value highlighting the more raised areas. If you want to do this from a top-down angle, think of a heavy zenithal.

You can see our full tutorial on that here.

If you don’t have an airbrush, you can go this route. First, you want to do a very heavy drybrush coat of white over black primer.

Then paint and wash your metals, then varnish the whole model. Once dry, you can then start applying the Speedpaint. The result will be a bit darker as you can see in the finished marine above.

Color Differences

As you can see from the swatches above, the new paints are on the right. They are a bit different from the original set, so, even if you have some of the older paints, the new ones will open up a new avenue of painting.

Army Painter Speedpaint 2.0 Review: Final Thoughts

While this might not win you any painting competitions with these, they will make your army look great on the tabletop! Not only that, it’s super fast. He’s also not 100% sure about the metallics yet, but overall, it’s a really cool product that works great.