Monday, June 9, 2008

Paint Rack


We got our new Games Workshop paint rack in today. It's a nice, tall rack that includes a place for the brushes, tools, painting guides and all the paints, including the Foundation paints, new wash sets and primer. I must not have been paying attention, however, as there were quite a few colors that got dropped from the range starting with this new rack (hints of this were in a recent White Dwarf I've come to learn). My favorite new color, terracotta, was discontinued, along with such well known favorites as tentacle pink and bronzed flesh. The inks are gone as are empty mixing bottles. These will all be put in our old Foundation Colors cardboard rack, since there are exactly 18 discontinued items, the same number as the foundation paints.

What kind of irked me about the rack setup was how they printed their description tabs. Colors that they consider best sellers now have multiple slots, if you use their tabs. Sometimes a color has up to three slots in the rack, such as skull white and chaos black. I can just imagine some bean counter at GW looking over their overall sales figures and saying, if skull white sells three times as many pots as any other colors, why not have three times as many slots in the rack? The answer is frequency. I may indeed sell the quantities they think I do, but I can't imagine a time when I would need 30+ bottles of a single color on-hand. Better would be tabs for those 18 lost colors. Meanwhile, you can find clones of some of those missing colors in the Vallejo Game Color line, although most GW painters are loathe to cross-over.

The best thing about the rack is it consolidates all their products into one place. Hopefully Foundation Colors will get more respect and visibility when they're better integrated with the line. Tools as well, have been apart for some time, at least in our set up.

Dropped Colors:

  • Bad Moon Yellow
  • Brazen Brass
  • Bronzed Flesh
  • Fiery Orange
  • Midnight Blue
  • Tenticle Pink
  • Terracotta
  • All Inks
  • Mixing Pots

1 comment:

  1. "These will all be put in our old Foundation Colors cardboard rack, since there are exactly 18 discontinued items, the same number as the foundation paints."
    Not a coincidence.

    "Meanwhile, you can find clones of some of those missing colors in the Vallejo Game Color line, although most GW painters are loathe to cross-over."
    Because most GW painters are morons.

    Ok, to be fair most simply are ill-informed about other offerings, but in the case of BDG customers, you carry the full line of Game Colors right there just a few feet away from the Citadel paints. They have no excuse.

    The usual attempted excuse is "I tried it once but it was too thick/watery." Translation: I didn't shake it up enough.

    I'm willing to accept that at some point someone may have honestly got a bad bottle, but I have well over a hundred bottles and have never had a problem. Compare that to the number of bottles of Citadel that have dried up on me over the years (nearly all of them at one point or another). I realize their new paint bottles are better, but they still aren't as good as the vallejo/reaper bottles.

    I still use some Citadel paints. There's a point at which most painters realize that every line has its strengths and weaknesses.

    Ok rant against painters stuck on Citadel off, rant against GW on:

    WTF were they thinking discontinuing bronzed flesh? I've probably bought more bottles of that than anything other than black! It's a freaking staple!

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