Contrasting Opinions: A Review

Contrast has been on all my painting related feeds and the takes about it have been flying thick and fast. In aggregate they have been generally positive but measured, which is probably the most sensible of them overall, with a few outliers on the fringes of the discourse. The positives of it are that it generally does what the advertising hype says it does, though with all paint ranges some of the colours do a better job than others. The outliers on the against side claim that this product isn't a magic bullet for painting, which to a degree is true, and that it will teach people bad habits about how to professionally paint miniatures to a high standard, which I mostly disagree with.

Anyway, since I have enough disposable income I have picked up a swath of the paints to try out on a few Reaper Bones monsters that I picked up some time ago solely to use as demonstrator miniatures for A Song of Blades and Heroes.

Usage

Since I am mostly going to be painting monsters and animals, I reasoned that Wraith Bone, being a warm white would be an ideal starting point. I also picked up a pot of it as a base paint to re-layer the base in the event of colour spilling over. I also grabbed some Praxian White to act as a highlight for the wraith bone, the idea being a two stage priming coat. 

To start with I put down the priming layer right onto the models. Then gave the models a drybrush with the Praxian White to try and emphasize highlights for the contrast paint.

After all the preparatory work was done and dusted I gave my first attempt at applying the Contrast a go. It went on easily and worked as advertised. My main complaint with it is that it is a very thin and runny liquid, which means applying it thick has a tendency to overload the brush and result in spillage onto other areas. After the initial coat I did soak up some of the excess with a damp brush, which was a good idea as despite the promises of the paint, still performs like standard GW wash in many respects and excessive pooling remains a problem if you aren't careful. After I let the contrast paint dry I cleaned up the over spill with more Wraith Bone base paint in preparation for more applications of contrast.

I repeated the steps described above for every other non metallic colour on the model. For the metallic chain mail and spear tip I put down a basecoat of VGC Gun Metal, and once it is dry I put down a layer of Black Templar to darken down the metal, which has a finish similar to a wash of Nuln oil.

The only stage that didn't use contrast was the base, which I did using a three colour base, overbrush, then drybrush method to do quickly. After that all that remained were a few other details which, like the other colours got touched up Wraithbone and painted with small amounts of contrast. In this case the details were the teeth, bone, and eyes, the eyes got a saturated yellow colour while the bone and teeth got the standard contrast bone colour.

With the Orcs out of the way I went to town with a variety of other colours on a selection of Bones minis and tried to see what they could do. You can see the results below. I'm extremely happy with how the Owlbear turned out. He was an experiment as to how you'd go about blending contast paints together, you can see the result on the belly. It was an experiment that mostly worked, though some fairly careful paint control is required to prevent one colour from fully taking over. Even so, this effect did require some more re-layer and blending to get right. The one thing that didn't work well was the fire effect, which can be seen on the Kobold mage, as to make that look realistic you have to invert how you normally do highlighting and work from lightest to darkest. Due to the nature of the paint this effect obviously wouldn't work, and to be honest I was too lazy to attempt the effect properly. It also is good as a filter on eyes as a glowing effect, as you can see on the weird fish monster, my apologies as I don't know the name of it.

Conclusion

Contrast works, but only to a degree. I also believe that this style of painting works better with more organic looking creatures like monsters, undead and zombies. On miniatures that are meant to look cleaner I believe that more traditional painting achieves a crisper effect . But you still can't argue with the speed it brings a model up to the bare minimum standard for the table top, which is why this product was created in the first place.

I have heard reports that it tends to rub off with handling, and while I haven't experienced it, a simple coat of matt or satin varnish should provide enough protection if you intend to use miniatures painted with Contrast as gaming pieces. While Games Workshop marketed this product for a specific purpose, the reality is that this product can be used to achieve many more effects than simply tinting a warm or cold white base colour in order to paint a miniatures. Games Workshop have already talked about using this to tint metallics to create different shades of metal, while this is one of the uses, this consistency and finish of Contrast are extremely similar to an artists ink, and can be used for similar tasks. The first one that came to mind, and that I experimented with were some simple freehand tattoos. Just paint on your design directly onto some finished skin with a very sparsely loaded brush, and once your design is done glaze some of the flesh tone over the top to make it look like the design is under a layer of flesh. This could extend to other applications, from freehand banners, to text on scroll work, this product is also potentially useful as a weathering effect. A brown colour can be painted onto terrain and legs of troops, then combined with Agrax and Typhus Corrosion to look like the model has been immersed in dirty water. Another idea is to stain clear plastic windows and canopies to tint them. I'm going to try this later and I'll report back on the results.

Overall, it is a worthwhile product, in terms of its effect, it handles similar to the existing glaze paints, but a far more pronounced effect and greater pigment density. This effect that can be reduced with the use of medium. As magic bullet for painting, it does what is advertised, though the quality of the finished work is low to middle table top standard at best, and if you want to get clean lines with it, expect to go back and repaint the base colour to clean up over spill. But for achieving extremely high standards of painting, you are still going to have to employ every tool that you have in your painters toolbox. Contrast is an interesting new technique, but it isn't the only technique, and I suspect this is why the pro painters are fearful that it will teach new painters a lot of bad habits as they come into the hobby.

The Thinnest of Coats

On Glazing

Glazing is a word bandied around in the miniature painting world but it is often used to describe a broad spectrum of similar techniques. So to start this article, there are a variety of techniques that can loosely be described as glazing and they are perfectly valid methods for achieving an effect. I'm going to describe my technique for glazing, and what situations are best for applying this technique.

To start with, I believe glazing is the most effective when you are glazing from highest highlight colour to the darkest shade. It is possible to start as a shade or mid tone, and glaze up, but this is a far more time consuming process, that is not to say that I don't do it. I tend to do this for thing highlights, but this often takes many more layers with significant drying time in between.

These are the colours used for this project, one mistake though I ask you to mentally replace the bottle of gloss varnish on the right with a bottle of Vallejo Glaze medium, thank you.

Stage One: Preparation

For this example I used my old school Commissar model to demonstrate this technique.

To start I applied a combined Chaos Black / Zenithal Corax White undercoat. As usual, I have fully prepared the model and have put down my usual layer of basing material before any undercoat hits the model. For this example I will be painting the greatcoat and hat material only, and I'm aiming for a black-grey colour.

Stage Two: Highlight Basecoat

To start the actual painting for the greatcoat I applied fully even coat of one of my highest highlight colours, in this case the highlight colour is Wolf Grey. Since this is a very light colour it will take two to three coats of colour to get an even layer. Once this coat is down, dry, and even, I now have a base on which I can work on our mid tones and shades. Since this was a base coat I used a basic base coat brush, one that can take a bit of punishment.

Stage Two: Mid Tone Glazes

For this stage I glazed in my first few mid tone layers of Shadow Grey. To start with I mixed the Shadow Grey with Glaze Medium at about a one to one ratio, with some water mixed in to reduce the thickness further. This resulted in a very thin liquid with virtually no viscosity, which is what I needed to achieve a consistency which works as a glaze. To apply this I switched to my Windsor and Newton Series 7 brushes, in this case a size two watercolour brush. To apply the paint I layered each section of the greatcoat with this mix with a downward stroke so that the majority of the colour tends to build up towards the bottom. The glaze medium also helped this colour run into the deepest recesses to further define our shadows. This stage is the most time consuming and can take upward of ten layers with significant drying time in between.

Stage Three: Shade Tone Glazes

This stage involves shading down the model even further. While I originally intended to make the Shadow Grey the majority colour of the model, I ended up leaning further into black. For this stage I used Black mixed with Glaze Medium and water at similar ratios to the previous step. I also used the same technique, painting from top down and also putting more colour into the shadow areas, such as under the arms and under the hat, and in the collar.

Stage Four: First Layer Highlights

This stage involves applying our first highlight layer. To start with I went back to our original underpaint layer of Wolf Grey and mixed it with Glaze Medium and water. To apply this I used only the tip of my brush and painted using upward strokes, ending the stroke on the most prominent points so that the colour would accumulate where the highest highlights should go. I repeated this process until I felt I had emphasized the highlights enough.

Stage Five: Second Layer Highlights

This was the final stage of the highlighting process. In this case I did not include any glaze medium in the mix and went with pure colour, in this case Ghost Grey, and thinned it with water. I was very selective as to where I applied this highlight, putting it on the highest points and sharpest peaks of the model to further emphasize the highlights.

Conclusion

Overall I find this technique very useful for blacks and grays, as it really provides a subtle transition of colour that you would normally have a hard time achieving if you start off from a black base coat, as the only way you can go from there is to highlight up. If you are not in a hurry this works well for characters and heroes as each layer by itself is relatively insignificant, but at each stage you can wait for it to dry, evaluate it, then decide if you've applied enough colour or not. This technique can also be used for tinting a variety of colours, as a matter of fact I've already covered this topic here and here. All of these techniques involve starting at your highest highlight and shading down. Most wargaming level painting teaches you to start at your mid or base layer and work your way up. To be fair going the other direction often isn't intuitive, but once learned can really help you use methods and techniques to to help speed up your painting without sacrificing quality. As a matter of fact, the new Contrast paints appear to be formulated to make use this shaded basecoat method that was first pioneered by James Wappel, citation needed of course. Traditionally painters use artist inks to achieve this washing in of colour, where Games Workshop appears to have made a product to take the hassle out of doing this step. With this in mind I'll probably pick up a selection of Contrast paints and the associated spray and do a review of them, either in video or text format depending on what I feel like and if my camera setup can hack it. Anyway, I hope this helps and best of luck applying it.