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Wednesday 27 June 2012

GW Paints

Hi all, 

Last Saturday, I went down to the local GW to buy White Dwarf, see what was going on with 40K and have a go at their latest painting competition. Now, this isn't a normal "paint up a model, bring it in and we'll judge it." Instead, you take along 1 under-coated model of your choice, any brushes and equipment you want to use (I took my wet palette down) and then you get 4 hours with the store paints.

Simple.

The contest aside, I really enjoyed the social aspect of this. There were around 12 people entered, and we stood around chatting whilst painting models. from the staff members point of view, they were more able to run around after customers, and leave us to our own thing- so win-win. Hopefully they'll run this again soon.


Anyway, on to the winners: 

The winner was a fantastically painted Ogryn. I neglected to get the painters name, but to paint this in 4 hours is a hell of an achievement.


I went for Lord Skrolk, and ended up placing joint-second.....


..with Simon, from Wakedean Wanderers, who you may recall beat me a few months ago in the National Hero painting competition.


So another decent showing. It's also the first time I've used the new GW paint range. Overall, they are as good as ever- I'm not too taken with the new Foundations (they don't have the same opacity) but their overall range as improved dramatically (especially the whites, which now give a decent coverage and blend well.) The ones which really blew me away were the glazes- these are fantastic! I've picked up the red and the yellow so far, and I'll be grabbing the other 2 soon- but why are there only 4? Oh well...

Other than that, I've also discovered a decent LGS, so more gaming is on the horizon- and they have access to WarmaHordes, Infinity, Malifaux, Flames of war... I spent a good 4 hours just chatting about different games systems the other day. Colour me happy :)

Comments, as always, are welcome.

7 comments:

  1. Nice one! It wouldn't hurt my local GW to do a competition like this; some people have loads of time to paint and some people don't, so it's not a bad idea to put a time limit on it so that someone doesn't win simply by virtue of having 20 hours to spend on 1 model!

    Really glad you enjoyed the social aspect of it as well; however good the games are, it's that sort of thing that makes it such a great hobby to be involved with.

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  2. I'm going to be suggesting this to the staff in the Swansea store too. Out of curiosity, did you pre-highlight and if so, did you get any comments or odd looks? It really is the ultimate technique for painting something well in this time frame or just generally.

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  3. Yeah, the time frame was a real equaliser, and made it much more of a competition. Plus the social aspect meant that we could swap tips and ideas with everyone else.

    We couldn't pre-highlight with colour, but we could undercoat and highlight with white (GW sprays- so I did a black spray, and a white directional spray from above, then my first coats were quite thin to pick it up and save some time.

    There's another idea floating around for "Iron Brush"- basically, you turn up and paint whatever model they provide on the day! No planning necessary. It'll cost a little money for the model, but using plastic boxed sets means it won't be more than £3- if they do it, I'll report back on the blog

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    1. I think I prefer the idea of picking your own model, though Swansea are doing their monthly competitions on a theme at the moment, for example, any model with a beard was a couple of months ago so they could always do this but with a theme for the model selection.

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    2. And what did they think of the wet palette? When I took mine in, one of the other guys decided to go to the local art shop and buy one. The guy in there told him it wasn't useful for miniature painting and refused to sell it to him. I assume the shopkeeper thought he was using enamels but he should have sold it to him anyway or the guy could just have gone and bought the stuff from the supermarket like I did.

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    3. I'll suggest the theme idea to them, although I do like the idea of turning up not knowing what I'll be painting.

      A few people were impressed by the wet palette idea- I don't think any of them went out to buy an official one, they just made their own, Blue peter style. the staff were sold on the idea, so expect to see one from GW in the next few years....

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    4. That wouldn't surprise me but it will probably be inadequately small to fit into the painting tray and incredibly expensive for refills until people suss that you can use baking paper. They're not that new an idea though and I doubt anyone knows who invented it. GW should start sourcing some decent equipment rather than all their gimic stuff like the flamer shaped airbrush or just say there's some really good kit out there, here's where you can get it. I don't understand why everything they sell has to be own brand and second rate rather than decent quality with some longevity.

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