Do you use one thick coat or thin your Contrast paints down? Don’t miss our Contrast guide for painting the new Sylvaneth!
The latest hype around hobby tabletops everywhere is Citadel’s Contrast Paints! We will put them through the test to see if they do indeed live up to the talk!
The Citadel Contrast Paints are all the rage on other web pages out there so we will give an honest and in-depth review about what we think about these new paints. Coming in at around $7.80 per pot and at 18mL, these Contrast Paints appear to be a little more watery.
Make sure that you give these pots a good shake to stir up the sediment that seems to collect at the bottom. Using an old paintbrush to stir the pot will help get more out of your paint pots.
Starting off this review, the Contrast Paints work best when painted over a base coat. Once base coated, the Contrast Paint system works its magic. Citadel Base Coat is compared to the Army Painter base coat in painting a Sylvaneth Revenant model. The model on the left is primed with the Army Painter Bone primer and the left with Citadel Wraithbone primer. As you can see, the Army Painter primer is a darker shade of bone (more like a Zandri dust from GW), and the Citadel primer is closer to a white pastel color.
The primer base coat helps make the Contrast Paints stick to your models just like a normal paint! The first Contrast Paint to test out is Aggaros Dunes. This color is like a brown color that will go over the wood portion of this Sylvaneth model. Getting a nice even coat across the entire model is the main objective. The Contrast Paints behave much like Citadel paint washes, so keep the same techniques in mind.
Warp Lightning goes great for Sylvaneth skin. You may need to thin some of the Contrast Paints before you use them since you can always add more paint as you go. The Contrast Paints have a longer dry time than other paints, so be careful in applying coats. Spreading the Contrasts around evenly is also an issue to watch out for as they will leave “coffee stains”.
From there we used for the Iyaden Yellow for the hair, Talassar Blue for the sword, and Blood Angels Red for the branch buds. We had to do some touchups with the Wraithbone brush paint over previous colors after they had dried. For single models there may be some slowdown in painting due to dry time, so batch painting whole models Contrast style is probably a good idea.
Contrast Model left, traditional painted model right.
Contrast Paints seem to for sure work well on Nurgle or Tyranid models with lots of detail as opposed to flat models like tanks.
The Citadel Contrast Paint system will surely spark tons of hobby debate as to whether or not they are worth it. However, the time saved using this system to paint your models just may be worth it for beginner painters.
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