Product Review - Vallejo Paints

Of late I have been working on collecting facets of the future military portion of my layout. In my mind, it will consist of a small yard to store my military train equipment and perhaps a airfield. Of course this will be based off of the 1944 era.

In gathering these components, one challenge is finding HO scale figures that are one, US Military from that era, and two, finding figures not in combat poses and descent quality. (that subject in itself warrants a separate blog post).

So I collect these figures I find that most of the ones I have found are unpainted Preiser figures so the next logical step would be to find paints that are of good quality and help me accomplish this.
After hearing a recent Scotty Mason webcast, Dave Frary mentioned that he used some Vallejo Paints and found them to be quite nice. So I purchased a 72 bottle model color set as well as the panzer aces set and a few game set bottles. Buying these sets from a dealer will run you about 200.00 - 250.00 bucks, pretty pricey. I found that you can get some good deals on ebay and paid around 100.00 for 140 bottles. Just shop around, used bottles are ok since you don't use a great deal of paint each time.
The bottles are designed to dispense extremely small amounts of paints so a bottle will go a long way. The paints are acrylic, so water dilution and clean up is a nice attribute.
The paint goes on well (after primer is applied), and if you invest is some good quality brushes such as 0/20, 0/10, and larger you will find that painting the smallest details very satisfying. Another nice thing is that the paints that are flat are dead flat.



The 3 varieties I purchased are;

Model Paints - These colors are the typical primary and variations of colors you will use. They contain metallic colors as well.

Military Paints (Panzer Aces) - These colors are used for all thing military as well as the darker spectrum, grays, tans, browns etc.

Game Paints - These are designed for the WarHammer Fantasy crowd and I found them to be a bit to loud for Model railroading (I only have a few of these colors)

I recommend these paints highly and due to the amount of colors I now have, will use them for all of my smaller details provided in the craftsman kits. They are a bit pricey new however.

All and all 5 lanterns....