Anyone who does miniature painting for fantasy and sci-fi gaming knows the love/hate relationship gamers have with craft store paints. They’re readily available and super cheap (as low as a dollar a bottle), but they also tend to not have saturated pigment, the pigment and medium often separate, and they’re hard to thin and often dry chalky. The reigning wisdom is: Use them for painting large terrain pieces, only; forget about using them on minis.

Brent of Goobertown Hobbies decided to put this belief to the test. He’s participating in a current YouTuber challenge to paint squigs (a primitive form of Orcs from the Warhammer universe). Brent decided to challenge himself to paint up his squigs using only three colors of Craftsmart paints. The results are pretty darn good, proving that (if you know what you’re doing), you can get reasonable results in miniature painting using the cheapest of paints.

(See the description for the video to find a list of other painters participating in the Squigs painting challenge.)