Are Craft Store Paints Worth Considering for Low-Budget Miniature Painting?
Cheap craft store paints are a real point of contention in the miniature painting/dungeon crafting communities. Some people say that they’re perfectly fine and will save you tons of money over expensive hobby paints and others say to avoid them like the plague. Jeremy of Black Magic Craft decided to do a test. In his early days of mini painting, he tried craft paints and found them too hard to work with. Now that he’s more experienced, he wanted to revisit them.
He decided to compare a paint job on identical minis using expensive paints, brushes, and a wet palette vs. cheap paints, brushes, and a homemade wet palette on the other.
Tl; Dr: He found that he got surprisingly decent results with Apple Barrel paints ($1.20 for 2 ounces) in comparison to Vallejo paints ($6-8 for 17ml). As with hobby paints, some colors handled better than others. Where he found the big different was in the paint brushes and in commercial washes vs. a homemade washes.
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