Last week we spoke to Vincent Knotley about his love for Contrast Paints, but he’s not the only expert miniature painter who champions them. Josh Hill – aka the Warhipster on Youtube – makes dozens of guides on advanced techniques with the Contrast range, so we had a chat about what makes them such an essential part of his repertoire.
Josh: The number one thing I love about Contrast Paints is their ease of versatility. Any tool, given enough technique or manipulation, can be used to do multiple different things – a base paint can be turned into a shade, a glaze can be used to drybrush, that sort of thing. I found that, with Contrast Paints, that manipulation of the tool is significantly less time-intensive to achieve the effects I want.
It’s a base-coating paint, but it’s also a shade. It can be used to blend or glaze, weather or stipple, and oftentimes you can do that straight out of the pot or with minimal thinning down. By its very nature it’s a paint that speeds you up, but it also speeds up your techniques and tricks. Just using it to block in base colours generally takes one coat straight out of the pot. It’s a huge time-saver!
Contrast has sped up almost every part of my painting process, even with infamously tricky colours like yellow or white. As an example I painted a Craftworld Iyanden Guardian at the weekend, and it was Battle Ready in about 25 minutes! Before Contrast I would probably have spent that amount of time on the first four coats of yellow alone.
It’s important to be gentle and neither use too much nor too little. Think of them a bit like a felt tip pen, where it basically doubles the saturation when you paint the same colour over itself, and it’ll help avoid blotchy results as you’re touching up mistakes.* Contrast Paints take longer to dry, so rather than lots of small brush strokes over an area to get it blocked in, use long broad strokes so the paint has a wide enough area to smooth out. Take it a panel, section, or a muscle at a time and methodically move around the model.
The sweet spot for loading your brushes is to have enough paint such that the brush is wet, but not so much that it starts to form a drip at the tip. If you load your brush up, hold it for two to three seconds, and it starts to look fatter at the end, you’ve got too much paint - just touch some of it back into the pot (or as I do on my thumb) and you’ll be good to go!
Oh, and don’t forget – keep water away from them! Just don’t use it! Something about water starts to separate the colours in the paint and leaves what can only be described as watermarks behind, like a thin dark ring around the outside of the paint. Mediums on the other hand don’t tend to do that, and both Lahmian Medium and Contrast Medium work great in different ways.
Contrast Medium spreads the pigment out over a wider area so you get a more diluted colour, while Lahmian Medium used in large quantities will do basically the same thing as Contrast Medium, but in smaller amounts I’ve found it is great for improving the flow of Contrast Paints. For me personally, four parts paint to one part Lahmian Medium is the sweet spot to make darker colours a little easier to apply (think Stormfiend, Dark Angels Green or Shyish Purple).
It can be tough to know where to start when collecting a range of Contrast Paints but, if pushed, I would say that Black Legion, Baal Red and Imperial Fist are especially amazing. You can apply them really easily to get a strong basecoat and then use other different colours and shades to shade and change them, like Black Legion with Nuln Oil over the top for probably the best and quickest application of a rich, smooth black paint I’ve ever used.
Other paints that make my top recommendations include Cygor Brown, Skeleton Horde, Black Templar, Guilliman Flesh and Talassar Blue. Not only are they just lovely colours on their own, they’re really versatile – Cygor Brown when thinned with Contrast Medium has a gorgeous red-brown hue to it, and Black Templar makes for excellent dark grey details or just using it over the top of other paints to create darker versions of the underlying base colour.
Just try them out and you’ll be surprised how much of an impact it has on your painting skills. You might even devise a few of your own tricks that you can share!
Thanks Josh! Next week, we will be speaking to the lost and the damned of Warhammer Community about how we use Contrast Paints. Tune in to find out which end of the brush goes into the paint and more!
In the meantime, the team at WarhammerTV are releasing a premium episode for free with yet more Contrast advice. Entitled Contrast Tips and Tricks, you can watch the video below:
* Don’t worry – everyone makes mistakes!
