The Army Painter
 Expect huge amounts of derp and rage, punctuated by /tg/ extracting humor from it. |
The Army Painter is a Danish hobby supply company that produces paints, basing supplies, brushes, and tools for painting models. They have a hell of a pedigree in wargaming, with founders Bo Penstoft working for over a decade at Games Workshop on their marketing side and being a staple of tournaments in northern Europe, and Jonas Faering working for 'Eavy Metal for quite a while before they both set out to create their own company. Their aim was (and mostly still is) to expedite the process between building the model and getting that sucker painted up, and they've largely done that with the invention of "Quickshade", and much cheaper paints than the competition. In the 2010's, they struck gold when they ended up the official paint and painting supply for Dungeons and Dragons with their Nolzur's Marvelous Pigments line.
Trivia: in 2020, they temporarily halted production on all paints to get little danish children a personalized bottle of hand sanitizer for their return to school during the Coronavirus pandemic, fulfilling a promise they made earlier in the year.
The paints themselves
Their paint range is usually considered cheap in price and in quality; you need to put more coats to get a decent coverage, sometimes too much medium dilution and all-around lower quality check than other, more expensive brands. Pretty much "babby's first paints" when you want to escape Citadel's insane pricing. Much "spongier" in finished paint texture than Citadel paint since it uses a gel based medium, which for some can be a bit off-putting since that means it dries slower. One thing that can be a drag is that the bottles aren't made with the same kind of rigor as a Vallejo bottle, so some of them can be cracked on purchase.
Furthermore, their starter kit is a fucking disaster of organization that you'll have to do yourself if you want to make any sense of it. The Nolzur's Marvelous Pigments line is largely a bunch of rebranded stuff from the regular line with an extra shade of purple, just now with a bunch of D&D terminology slapped across it.
This reputation began to change for the better in the 2020s when they got tired of being a third rate paint company in an increasingly competitive market and made significant changes to their product lineup. Better quality and consistency, improved labeling and color triad definitions, more ready-to-go paints and solutions, and their own knockoff of GW's Contrast paints (which, like the other Contrast clones, is fine for its intended purpose of quickly getting a big army presentable but doesn't highlight as well as the original). They even include a stirring ball in each bottle now. This obviously came with a price increase, but now they're more of a direct competitor to Citadel and Vallejo.
Quickshade, and miniature dipping in general
Miniature "dipping" has been around for awhile as a concept, usually by those turbonerd boomers who aren't painting Orks with chain-axes or skeleton wizards. The idea is that you can get around the arduous process of painting and washing the details of a model using the right pigmented varnish, but it has always been a bit of a mixed bag; historically it used stuff like shoe polish or floor varnish, which is very difficult to use, noxious, took days to dry, and can absolutely fuck your model right up if you weren't attending to it constantly. The Army Painter decided they would take this age-old concept and make something actively designed for miniatures, creating what they call "Quickshade", a specific type of varnish in various strengths and shades of brown to black designed to be used in miniature painting. When it came out, it damn near revolutionized painting dozens, if not hundreds, of models at once that will never need any sort of upkeep as it's been varnished already, since the only thing you'd really need is to keep it from pooling outside of details you wanted highlighted and took a process that could be close to hours and turned it into minutes. However, it was and has always been very contentious as it enables a technique that is a quick, dirty, and honestly kind of "cheaty" way to highlight the details of a model without putting in a lot of the real work, skill, and love that using washes and inks would. This also completely ignores the fact that a lot more of those 'Eavy Metal type painters you see here and there might use more of this stuff than you might think, but alas.
Of course, one of the reasons it's largely fallen out of favor with most painters is that while it has it's numerous advantages, that shit has but one minor problem: It is a fucking nightmare to use properly. It has a long drying time, has a lot of hassle in getting all that gunk out of areas you don't want it pooling, requires a lot of work on your part to keep them from looking like they just fell out of the back of a gas truck, and, if you didn't want everything to have an unusual glossy finish, it requires a quick spray of matte coating to keep everything looking good. It's also got the unfortunate drawback of needing a specific brush to move that stuff around because using your good brushes on this shit will wear them out badly.
Then they made quickshade washes, which does roughly the same shit but way, WAY better and doesn't require you to shake your model off or get a brush you're never gonna use for anything else to get the right coverage and you won't have paint pedants greentexting you about using a dip so for chrissake just use those instead.
Battlefields
Where paint and quickshading can be its own can of worms, one thing that is uniformly praised about the Army Painter is that their basing materials are absolutely phenomenal. Easy to apply, comes in a convenient "dippable" box, and the tufts are something that little dabs of super glue and a pair of tweezers work wonders with. Chances are, if you have to have anything from these guys in your arsenal, it's probably this.
The Other stuff
It exists. Beyond a couple of cool things like a pocket laser pointer to confirm a model's field of view, it's nothing you couldn't get at the hardware store - but with Army Painter's logo on it and a 50% markup.