hello everybody and welcome to another hobby cheating video and today we're going to talk about my favorite Paints the ones I most likely to put on the desk and more importantly to actually use on a miniature let's get into it the strict technomancer that is Vincy V let us get to the technique and learn Vin so one thing is for sure I love paints I probably have about 1600 bottles of paint in my office probably about 1,200 of them are on the wall around me at all points in time to say I have an addiction to trying different paints and using a bunch of different paint is perhaps an understatement now that being said we all know that no matter how many paints you have whether it's 10 or a thousand there are always a few paints that rise to the top that end up being your go-tos that are things you love because of their properties their color their tone the way they the the way they actually resolve on the miniature whatever it is there are certain paints that we just love and so today I'm going to take you through my favorite paints and we're going to do that by sort of category or at least categories as I see them and these are just paints that I really like and maybe you might like to right up top let's start with brand so this is Broad rid large there are three paint brands that I favor those are pro acry uh Pro acril from Monument Hobbies which is excellent uh love it now obviously I do have an affiliate operation them and I have paints uh that I've made with them but they are regularly part of basically every miniature I paint as you'll see in many of my videos and Beyond Brand number two is the Army painter their new fanatic line so that is to say the the improved new line of army painter paints uh that fanatic line really corrected all of problems that used to be there with old army painter which I did not like at all and would not recommend uh but the new stuff is fantastic it is a regular part of what I paint with I really enjoy using them I like how thick they are I like how creamy they are uh and I like how they paint lastly is AK interactive third gen now uh this paint is really I think just a modern take on what was the classic Vallejo which always was a main stay in my line when I started um but they're just sort of more densely pigmented and easier to work with I find no matter the thickness you're aiming to resolve so those are my three uh favorite paint brands that I keep uh sort of at hand at all times but there are other ones that I'll sometimes use as well as we'll see when we get into specifics all right with the specifics done I think it's time to get into our categories and talk about some specific paints so first off is skin tones now there's a lot of different skin tone paints that I end up using but and this actually will cover all three of my previously stated Brands um whether it's darker tones to begin with your base layering highlights uh or things like that all of these paints I use and I love painting skin so there's a wide range of paints I will often use uh so whether it's Army painter and their fur brown or the shadow flesh uh from Pro acry these two paints really jump out at me as sort of a way to start layering up there's lots of good choices amongst both Pro acry and army painter that I'm often using and uh including these like more pinky tones and stuff like that uh these paints you see here I really do enjoy a lot now one of the keys to make these very pink skin tones work and there's several in both ranges as you can see that fit into this category is a good green color what for skin just trust me uh the pink tones get offset by the green to produce a nice neutral sort of Caucasian skin tone if that's what you're going for so both green Gray from ak3 gen uh as well as faded green from uh Pro acry are usually part of my recipe uh at the end as I start mixing it into both cool and contrast the pink and build myself towards a more naturalistic flesh tone I really like all of these different paints now if you're going for darker skin tones then there's also a series of Browns that I really love so if you're trying to go for more African skin tone you can work in a lot of the darker skin tones I talked about so the shadow flesh or anything like that still certainly works but then I really like uh warm Brown from Pro acry as well as a couple of these other Browns from army painter that you see here uh they just serve really well to build up those uh skin tones uh into sort of more African darker skin colors the highlights for those are going to end up being the same highlights I'll usually end up using a more pale flesh tone uh to or or maybe something with a little yellow influence but it's a little more rare uh to then build up the highlights in those uh darker skin tones so with that we've got the whole penopoly of skin tones covered I can do everything I want to lay down my base skin tone but of course that's not all I'm also a fan of filtering and toning skin adding additional color and visual interest to it and these four speed paints from army painter speed paint 2.0 are perfect for that if you've seen me paint display quality skin and I've done several videos on it you'll know I often use the airbrush at the end and thin this speed paint down to create uh these sorts of very thin filters over the skin it both can hide a little bit of your previous blending sins but importantly it adds the subtle richness and Hue uh to your skin that really makes them more visually compelling this really adds a lot of the yellow tones the red tones and the purples to the Shadows so I really like all four of these uh these are my go-tos when it comes to uh the paints I use for painting skin on Miniatures and that is my favorite thing to paint I paint a lot of it all right next up let's talk Universal highlights and shadows so I generally do mixes for my highlights and shadows I'm not one to just use the next step up if I need a lighter blue I don't just grab light blue I actually think that's mostly wrong it makes your figures look not credible in the light is the problem because they look like they're in different typ of Lights as you pick a war warmer or colder highlight color for each individual tone so I've never been a fan of Triads but in the Universal highlight category this bright pale yellow or traditional ice yellow uh the first one being from Pro acry the second one being from um uh AK third gen um but lots of people make ice yellow but these are the two I really really enjoy now when I need colder tones uh I will often times go for something like a uh like this uh very white blue uh from my own uh pro acry line for my specialty line uh and I find that that is really the perfect highlight color when you want that cold highlight you want to show somebody in a cold environment Cold Light Etc my other go-to for highlight tones and I actually use all of these in place of the in place of white that is say everything here is used in place of white I almost basically never use dead white uh my other go-tos are The Pastels from AK th gen I do really like this entire set there is a pastel purple blue green pink and Peach and so on and frankly all of them get used by me uh I use the pastel Peach sometimes uh mixing it into skin tones to add a little vibrancy so the previous mixes I talked about um I use it to highlight red and then put red glazes over it to make the red really kick and Pop um I use it as the highest highlight in colors like purple and then Glaze The Purple over it to get a beautiful satin Sheen unbelievably useful these pastel tones either as your highest highlight uh or as just a replacement for white so anytime you are going to use white you go to the pastel green blue purple I know it looks weird in the bottle you're like there's no way this isn't even close to white but as you put it in the miniature as your highest value paint it will basically look white to your eyes more proof of why you should shouldn't trust the bottle or need to worry about exact matches your eyes do the work for you and really create the image in your mind based on the entire thing and what paints are near it not what the thing looks like alone in the paint bottle on the universal Shadow side obviously I have a set of tones that I'm a fan of starting off with of course pay's Gray from my specialty Set uh this was a paint that I worked hard to design with Jason from Monument um this pro acry paint I find un believably valuable I use it all the time uh for you know my Universal Shadows uh to do the darkest colors on again skin or cloth or basically anything I mentioned there right um it just as a universal Shadow color it more or less works on everything I even use it on metallic paints for my shadow often it's just an incredibly useful color now uh also on the side if I want something warmer uh we have this really beautiful like dark red almost Crimson tone from Pro acry that's great when you want warm Shadows so if you have very cold highlights this can be great to mix into your shadows there uh so again on the the warm side um ak3 gen does make anthracite which is a or whatever it's called I don't know how you say that word but I I think that's what it's called um it's this sort of very very dark blue I like that one a lot as well and we'll often use that to bridge in between pay's gray and the other tones if I want uh through glazes and then finally sometimes you do just just need something that's black or almost black and my particular favorite right now is a color called tenous Gray from AK thir gen this actually is a hyper dark black purple and so because of that it's a little softer than traditional black it doesn't it has still a little bit of chromatic uh uh Hue to it like that purple does a lot of work especially if you spread it out real thin you'll see the color um but I really love using this as like my shadow tone for metals uh as a shadow tone on red it really really works so well like if you've got a bright red cloak and you want to capture those Shadows this is the perfect choice because it uh because it has that slight purple tone in it it just feels very naturalistic on the red while still creating a dark enough shadow that you're in the right place so overall that's my Universal highlight and shadows uh love all of these all right next up let's do a little rotation of some bright colors first up fluoresence there are really two fluorescent sets that I tend to use um anytime I need to use fluoresence which is a more uh you would think that would be more rarified but I paint a lot of glowing things so it it gets used a lot um plus fluorescents are really good for making certain colors like red really pop so uh and and you'll see that happen in videos where I lay down the um the fluorescent tone and then glaze the color over top a lot at any rate golden high flow is is uh really for my money one of the best fluorescents on the market the bottles are big they're not that expensive they're made more for traditional artists but they work excellent in our craft as well in the traditional miniature line the only fluorescent that I really like is the stuff from Pro acry their fluorescent range is quite excellent um it's thicker the golden line is very thin very Inky this is a little thicker so you can kind of place it and push it around on the miniature which has a value so it kind of depends on what I'm looking for in it like if I want to work through the airbrush then more or less my go-to is the golden high flow if I'm looking to just Place some very small paint uh with the brush I'll often go to Pro acry so it's more of just like what am I trying to do will end up deciding which paint I use now we can't talk about bright colors in my world without talking about turquoise and magenta I'm not going to go through every color in the rainbow completely although I'll talk about many of them um but turquoise and magenta are two colors I am very well known for and this selection of turquoises you see in front of you is often what I like to work with the new Army painter turquoises I really do enjoy I think they're they're pretty great um but also this new turquoise from Rogue Hobbies line in Pro acry is also really wonderful generally I'll end up using these all of these colors often for things like verree on copper or as well just doing you know bright turquoise cloaks and other things like that this range really gives me something nice to work with though I'll often combine it with the previously mentioned Universal highlights and Shadows on the magenta side there's quite a range again starting with the dark magenta from Pro acry uh once again from Rogue Hobbies line uh which is great that whole that whole line is just really good um Louise made just an incredible selection of six paints that I really really enjoy um that is often what I'll use as sort of a Bas um to lay down or maybe it'll go over some kind of like one of the aforementioned dark flesh tones uh depending on kind of what I'm painting and what's going on but that's usually a good base and this is one of the few places I still use my Camara paints um the Chimera magenta is really good but also a new competitor has entered The Fray in the adom paints magenta I really like this Adam Pat's magenta it's a really nice color um magenta tends to have a very distinct pigment that it uses and so most of these paints are actually using the same pigment it's just a question of the rest of their additives and mix as to how I like it now also there are pinks that that are higher up in the range like the old Rose you see here that I will often mix in for highlights in the magenta so I'll I'll kind of this is a good additive color in there to get some brighter magenta before I eventually go to the universal highlight colors of the ice blue or sorry yeah the ice blue the ice yellow and so on and so forth uh to then get my highest highlights on my magenta tones but with this little selection you really have kind of everything you need in the bright tones another color that I'm often painting a lot of these days especially as I'm working on my scaven Army is Reds and Red is classically a very challenging color for people um because they try to paint it over black and that doesn't work uh it just doesn't red is something that is highly translucent and very much shows the tone and the value that's underneath it so for me the I start with red all the time as burnt red um this burnt red from proac is absolutely my go-to it replaced old whole red from several other lines I used to use um I love it it covers well it lays down what I want it gives me a good solid red tone as a base it's everything I'm looking to have in a red tone and I absolutely love it it's fantastic um from there I'm building up into brighter more intense Reds and there's a couple that I will often go to one of my new favorites is this atom red but I'll also sometimes use things like the golden soflat pyro red obviously using a pyrro pigment as opposed to a a there there's several different red pigments some lean more pink some lean more orange and so on but I tend to like the py roll it just kind of has the vibrancy that I enjoy uh and the this atom paint is just really really really intense I love it for getting those bright Reds this is what I use in my scaven Army in conjunction with the aforementioned uh pastel Peach to lay down the Highlight the fluorescent orange to create the glow and then this atom red over the top to create the glaze and make those really popping popping popping Reds you see for example here in these that the picture of these scaven that I have uh painted that was what I finished up some time back so that's the sort of sequence and the way I like to to sort of work with my Reds one last color I want to mention here is purple but specifically more on the Violet side I really like violet more than I like purple like if I'm going to get red purple or yeah like sort of a purple with reddish influence I traditionally just will use some kind of magenta but Violet the cooler side the purple with a blue influence generally a lot of people haven't made very good Paints in that range I'll be honest um you know for a while I would use some of the Vallejo paints but I've just been really sad um I even went out a long time ago and bought the nocturna set I think I have a review of that very old on the channel and I just really didn't like those paints very much they were hard to work with but they were just the only people around making a full set of that Violet range happily that is no longer the case Army painter in their new uh line has a wonderful six set of violets that I really like especially the darkest purple you see here um that super dark purple is great so often times I want that really dark purple blue um as like sort of the Shadow tone or base tone uh of of work and this actually Nails it perfectly it's on my palette a lot um whenever I'm sort of touching purple this is often my go-to first paint and then I'll pick something else from the range to kind of integrate in and then from there it's into the universal highlights the ice Blues The Pastels uh anything like that depending on the temperature that I want to achieve sometimes even as I mentioned pastel peach or those kind of skin tones if I want sort of the warm highlight and the cold Shadows this actually achieves that since that base uh terrestrial purple tone is really cold so that's great uh all in all that's most of the Hues again like when it comes to yellows there's quite a different selection of yellows and oranges I use stuff like that I'm not really going to go into those too much I don't paint a lot of yellow um and there's a lot of different yellows that you could use contrast paint yellows are fine um there's plenty of pro acry o that are fine really the key with yellow has very little to do with the paint and almost everything to do with what's underneath it so having a good unders shade where you run from uh brown or Reds or pinks Salmons up to uh White uh but then having that pink in the mix is what gives you a good yellow tone any more than one individual paint um so there you go uh that's sort of my run of normal matte paints that are often on my palette but it's also worth mentioning here uh I think one last thing and that is what actual whites white paints do I use I talked a little bit about the darker colors and tenis greater a place black but I haven't mentioned actual white tones or off-white tones because sometimes you do want something in the off-white space as opposed to a little more chromatic Hue influenced for me that's this selection um red gray both proac and AK third gen make an excellent red gray is usually my starting point um I really like buff from ak3 gen as sort of my bone color that's very warm but this dark bone from Pro acry is also quite excellent the highest highlight I usually ever go to is sort of ivory or bright Ivory Pro acry is well known for having some of the best white or near white paints on the market and they're just frankly usually my go-to have been for quite a long time so bright Ivory ivory bone all of those things in Pro acry I like um but I do also like the AK thir gen Ivory it's also quite nice so if those are more available in your area frankly it's almost six of one half a dozen of another they're slightly different values but it in the end it doesn't make much difference in your painting both of these ranges have um some solid whites though I would absolutely put Pro acril still as the king of sort of white paints on the market especially these near whites the ivory bright ivory bone all of those things are uh wonderful in how they apply and they there's the newest Challenger here which is this heavy Warm White which came out of um Matt sewi and Ben Comet sets and honestly I've come to really love this it's very thick it's almost more like a heavy body acrylic and so it's really interesting how you can kind of place a little glob of it and spread it around on the miniature to get a nice Feathering effect with it um it does handle a lot of the traditional chalkiness problems with whites and uh so that's kind of replaced some of the other heavy body acrylics I would often use uh and and whenever I need a white tone so pretty cool lastly let's go out on metallics that's right the one the only metallics that I normally use Vallejo metal color um it just is what it is they are still the best their new formula new new formula they've relaunched again uh they had a period during the pandemic where they had things labeled new formula and frankly it didn't really work they separated super fast because they had to use a replacement for the alcohol that they used cuz that alcohol became scarce during the pandemic but they've now relaunched with a better formula much closer to the old formula and I'm back and I'm in love again here we are uh it's perfect it's liquidy it's uh shoots to an airbrush fine works on the brush the thing I always hear people say is it's too liquid I place it and it flows everywhere folks you can't just dip in the paint and paint with this stuff you shouldn't never do that anyways like you should be but as always you need to dip into the paint and then Wick out the liquid onto a paper towel once you do that and get rid of the excess liquid it's then going to apply smooth as butter opaque as all get out easy to stipple with to fade to blend to glaze you can do everything with fleo metal color brush or airbrush except no substitutions when it comes to Steel paints now of course with Golds well the gold and the copper are a problem I will still use my gold mix that is still what I use video linked up above so check that out I won't go into great detail here I have to mix my own gold but one new interesting competitor is this brand newest offering from Pro acry this sort of dark bronze um I really like this paint I didn't think I was going to but I actually really do it's one of the first metallics out of their range that really impressed me I'm hoping to see more like this from Pro acril in the future um because this is has better opacity it isn't quite as sparkly um it spreads better and and reflects better so uh I think probably Ben and Matt worked to get this exact tone and to get the quality of this paint and honestly I'm I'm pretty happy with it uh I look forward to seeing what Pro acril does in the future with metallics is I think they've got a good they're they're on an upward trajectory so hopefully we can actually get a competitor here to Vallejo metal color maybe even in the steel ranges there you go that's a lot of paints that's everything that I favor and tends to be on my desk of course there's lots of other paints that will tend to be around and I'll utilize um but if you've got questions about a color or a range or something like that I didn't touch on drop those down in the comments below I always answer every question asked if you uh want to support the Channel first of all we really appreciate that hit like hit subscribe all those things are free and it's it helps get this video in front of other people uh if you want to support the channel and actually spend some money no problem there are affiliate links Down Below in fact for some of to pick up some of the paints I've talked about today doesn't cost you anything extra in fact often saves you money there's also uh the books that Uncle Adam and I do if you're looking for a new game uh we we make skirmish games those are all linked down below and of course there is our patreon focused on review and feedback and taking your next step on your hobby Journey we'd love to have you as part of the community as always though I thank you so much for watching this one and we'll see you next time [Music]