Federation Commander

Recently I had to buy some replacement paint and picked up some GW, Testors, and Tamiya paints. I'm happy with the GW paint, it's been consistent quality for many years. The Testors acrylics I haven't used yet.

The problem is the Tamiya. I bought Silver, Red, and Dk. Gray. The Silver is fine, I'm happy with it and would buy more when this jar runs out...in about 5 years. The Red/Gray...horrible. The paint doesn't stick to the primered ships (2 different brands) and doesn't cover well at all. I'm going to end up tossing them, which is fairly dissapointing.

I've heard the Vallejo is good paint, haven't tried that yet.

Starfury wrote: The problem is the Tamiya. I bought Silver, Red, and Dk. Gray. The Silver is fine, I'm happy with it and would buy more when this jar runs out...in about 5 years. The Red/Gray...horrible. The paint doesn't stick to the primered ships (2 different brands) and doesn't cover well at all. I'm going to end up tossing them, which is fairly dissapointing.

I use Tamiya almost exclusively for the primary colors (Reds, white, black, greys, yellow) and have had no problems whatsoever. Tamiya thins properly for airbrushing, and their metallics are awesome. Coverage is excellent and it sticks well to primed and unprimed metals.

Sounds like you just go a bad batch.

Starfury wrote: The problem is the Tamiya. I bought Silver, Red, and Dk. Gray. The Silver is fine, I'm happy with it and would buy more when this jar runs out...in about 5 years. The Red/Gray...horrible. The paint doesn't stick to the primered ships (2 different brands) and doesn't cover well at all. I'm going to end up tossing them, which is fairly dissapointing.

I've heard the Vallejo is good paint, haven't tried that yet.

I usually use the Tamiya brand paints for base coating my Federation ships. Their paints thin for airbrushing better than any of the other brands and they cover evenly and well. I agree with the previous post. You must have gotten a bad batch.

As for the Vallejo paints, our FLGS just started carrying them. I picked up a red, a white, and a black - to sample. I like them a lot. They are the only brand of paints that I can use straight from the bottle. Most require a bit of thinning to work as they should. I don't think that I will switch to those shades exclusively as the individual bottles are quite pricey and smaller than most other brands. Painting a fleet of 150 to 200 Federation or Klingon ships could get costly.

Are these Acrylic paints?

I ask because I have a lot of paints from back when I did Battletech and WH40K, and I used the paints that I got at Wal-mart back in the Crafts section. They seemed to do pretty well, and seem to be relatively inexpensive. (I'll have to look at the specifics on the bottle when I get home)

They seemed to have a nice wide range of colors and shades among the colors too... but then it's been a while since I looked.. LOL

Tom

Tom: The acrylic paints from Wal-Mart aretypically CeramCoat brand, Folk Art brand, and Apple Barrel brand. 90% pf the paints I use are one of these three brands adn came from the local Wally-world.

If you scan through the archive messages i the miniatures section, you'll see multiple posts from me sionging the praises of these off brands... cost, number of colors and color variants, size of the bottle, availability (Wal-Mart is open 24/7 if you happen to run out of the exact color you need at 3:00 a.m.), etc...

But, I do have / and use the other brands as well for specific applications such as air-brushing, washing, glazing, etc...

LOL Yeah, the Folk Art and the Apple Barrel are the ones I use. I never have gotten into using an airbrush or such, which I know would probably hurt the overall look of a mini, but for a bit, I think it'd be more for painting and relaxing, than overall look.

(Maybe somthing for dad/son times or such. )

Thanks!