Games Workshop released Killteam Octarius (Orktarius), the launch box for a new edition of Killteam two years ago in August 2021. This week I finally finished painting the Ork Kommandos from the box! Let’s not talk about the Krieg squad and how they’re painting is going, or the contents of the Beast Snaggas box released a month before the Octarius box…
For the Kommandos I’ve been using Vallejo Xpress Color paints and this is the first full unit I’ve painted with them. I’d not used contrast style paints before so it was an interesting process. They are definitely quicker to deliver an adequate finished paint job, than traditional layer paints. If you use the “slapchop” (prime->zenithal->contrast->highlight) method you can get a really strong result. But, I still found myself getting frustrated with the paints at times. To get a good contrast effect you need a lot of paint. Putting a lot of paint on the model makes it difficult to keep things tidy. I find I keep spotting small areas, nooks and crannies, where I’ve missed or that have wee splodges of the wrong paint on them.
Of course, being contrast paint, if there’s a mistake somewhere you can’t just paint over it as the paint is not opaque. So if you put the correct contrast paint over a mistake you can still see the mistake. I am not a neat painter at the best of times so I find this pretty infuriating. With traditional layer paints I rely on going back over the model at the end to tidy up all the bits where I’ve gone over the lines, or whacked my brush on to the wrong part of the model. On the other hand, maybe this will train me to be neater?
Anyway, I do like contrast paints and as a firm proponent of Vallejo over Citadel (cheaper, dropper bottle supremacy), it’s good to see the Xpress Color paints giving great results. It’s just a different experience to the classic method of painting a model. Are contrast paints now the default standard? No, I don’t think so. I think I’ll keep using them for scenery and troops (I have a lot of Beast Snaggas still to paint for example, but we weren’t going to talk about that) but will probably go back to layering for characters, vehicles and elite units. With one exception. I love the effect of the Xpress paint on the Ork skin. I’m sorely tempted to use that as my new standard for the Greenskins.
After all that paint chat, the important thing is that I have a fully painted Kommando unit and I even got a game in with them at the weekend. Not only that, but I won. A hard fought victory against some Ultramarine Intercessors. Mistakes were made at deployment as usual and most of my most special specialist boyz got shot clean off the board in the first four activations. But points win prizes and I managed to rack up enough objectives by the time we talked it out at the end of turn three I had an unassailable lead. And a large squad of dead Orks.
Mince and Skirlie 