Skip to main content

I’m officially done with Citadel paints

Citadel paint pots are bad

After sitting on the fence for about a year, I finally bit the bullet and decided that I will replace all my Citadel paints with Vallejo ones. The reason? The ‘new’ Citadel paint pots are defective. Don’t get me wrong, Citadel paint itself is great to work with, but what good is that when you have to throw half of it away because it has dried out again? 

The old hard plastic Citadel pots with their black lids kept the paint nice and fresh for years and years. The new rubbery monstrosities, however, only close properly the first couple of times that you use them. After about a dozen times opening and closing them, the hinges no longer work properly and your precious paints will start drying out. Honestly, I can’t even remember the last time that I’ve been able to use all the paint in a Citadel pot. I usually get about halfway before the paint becomes utterly unusable. 

Vallejo paints, on the other hand, are just as pleasant to work with and cover just as well, but come in properly sealable dropper bottles. Vallejo paints are also much cheaper. Citadel paints sell for about €3,- to €3,50 for a 12 ml pot, while Vallejo paints sell for €2,50 or €2,60 for a 17 ml pot. So per pot Citadel costs €1,- more for 5 ml less paint. And you don’t even get to use all of it! Vallejo paints also smell nicer ;-) 

So, after getting this off my chest I’m heading to my favourite online hobby supply store Scenery Workshop and ordering about 30 fresh new Vallejo pots. It’s a bit of an investment now, but worth every penny (or Eurocent) in the end.

Citadel paint pots are bad
An example of a defective Citadel lid. The lid is supposed to sit flush with the pot, but without the use of a vice grip or hammer that isn’t going to happen.

Labels:

Comments

  1. Anonymous18 July 2021 at 12:49

    Woop woop! Louder for the people in the back! :-)

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

More simple Warhammer 40k terrain: craters and rubble piles

Time for some more simple 40k scenery: craters and rubble piles. Both are pretty easy projects and pretty quick too, if unlike me you plan out your work a little so you don’t need to continuously correct your mistakes along the way! For the craters, I started with two old writeable dvd’s. I first closed off the central holes with mdf miniature bases. I then broke off semi-triangular wedges of cork from a pan coaster and hotglued these to the dvds, forming circles (see the picture below). I then applied wall filler to the craters to hide the mdf circles covering the central holes and to add some texture to the cork. I then glued smaller bits of cork in between the larger wedges and added coffee grounds for texture. After this step I noticed that the cork wedges didn’t look very natural. Tapering them off made them look a lot better (picture below). I then gave everything a coat of black paint:  I still thought the craters didn’t look quite right, though. They were a bit too uniform ...
2 comments
Read more

Holy cel-shaded abs, Batman!

I thought I’d do something a little different for my first post of 2023. I picked up this Batman figure second hand about 15 years ago. Back then he wore an all black suit with the Tim Burton yellow logo and a yellow utility belt.   I had repainted him years ago, but never really liked the result, so over the Christmas break I had another crack at it. I sculpted a new bat logo out of Miliput, filled in some of the joints, and repainted Batsy in a cel-shaded style somewhat similar to Mike Mignola’s artwork. I did this by illuminating the figure from the top left and then tracing the shadows. I tried to paint him so that the effect works from all angles, but I think it’s most effective from the front and left. The colour palette is very limited: Vallejo Medium Sea Grey 70.870 and Black 70.950 for the suit, Flat Earth 70.983 and Charred Brown 72.045 for the utility belt and Basic Skin Tone 70.815 for the skin. By the way, it may not come across in the pictures, but at 30 cm Batsy ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Gloomhaven characters

Back in the winter of 2020/2021, my wife and I played a lot of Gloomhaven. After several months of playing multiple games a week we put it away for a while, but recently we picked it back up again.  Gloomhaven is probably one of the best tabletop games I’ve played. The only downside in my mind is that it can easily take you 15 minutes to set up a scenario, especially if you don’t invest in some aftermarket box inserts to organise the literally thousands of tiles, tokens, cards and standees. But once you’ve set everything up, the game plays really well. Plus, I really like that it is a cooperative game in which the players need to work together to get through a scenario.   Anyway, the game comes with 18 plastic ‘heroic’ 28 mm or 32 mm scale miniatures. The monochrome grey plastic really stands out against the beautifully colourful floor tiles, so obviously these had to be painted... The plastic is a bit softer than your average model kit, but a lot harder than the soft plas...
Post a Comment
Read more