In this always up-to-date post, you will find all my FREE hand-painted colour swatches for all 61 old & new Citadel Contrast paints, all 89 Speedpaints 2.0 by The Army Painter, all 59 Xpress Colors from Vallejo, all 36 Dipping Inks by Green Stuff World, and NOW also all 48 Scale 75 Instant Colors. This should make it easy to find the perfect “one coat” colour for your next project.
My free hand-painted “one coat” paint swatches
I heard my hand-painted swatches are quite popular with you guys, so here are the entire Citadel Contrast, Speedpaint 2.0, Vallejo Xpress Color, Green Stuff World Dipping Inks, and Scale 75 Instant Color ranges for free. All five comparison sheets shown were painted under the same conditions on white primed plasticard and professionally photographed under neutral 5500K light. This makes them more accurate than any other graphic or colour picking tool, and all five swatches are comparable with each other. You can find out how I make my colour sheets in this post.
And if you want to know which range is my favourite, then make sure to read the respective reviews. Or scroll below at the bottom of the post, you can find a video in which I rank all the ranges in a tier list.
Comparison of all 61 old & new Contrast colours
Check out my extensive review of the second wave of Citadel Contrast here.
Patreon bonus content: You can find uncompressed, high resolution versions of these swatches on my Patreon, as I’m not limited by server space and loading times there. Just click here.
Comparison of all 89 Speedpaints 2.0 from The Army Painter
And here is the sheet for The Army Painter’s Speedpaints, which I just recently updated to cover all 89 colours of the Speedpaint 2.0 range.
While I wasn’t a big fan of the original formula, I’m warming up to Speedpaint 2.0 and use them more and more often, as the range offers so much choice. Check out my in-depth review in this post.
Comparison of all 59 Vallejo Xpress Colors
Vallejo took a while to enter the “one coat” paint game, but now they released two waves of Xpress Color, which also includes a subrange of 8 highly-pigmented “Intense” paints. As of now, there are 59 colours plus Xpress Color Medium.
I found Vallejo’s Xpress Colors to be quite nice, especially for Slapchop and zenithal basecoats. More about the Xpress Color range in my review here.
Comparison of all 36 Dipping Inks from Green Stuff World
Since I reviewed the original 24 Dipping Inks, Green Stuff World expanded its range with 12 additional colours which you can find in the graphic below (it also seems that they renamed Black Shadow to Green Stone dip based on the product number).
I also wrote a review of the original 24 colours with a few more thoughts about their general properties, check it out here.
Comparison of all 48 Instant Colors from Scale 75
Scale 75 were actually the first to launch a similar “one coat” paint product after Contrast. The color palette is rather pale, many colors are quite muted and opaque.
Instant Colors feel very different to the other “one coat” paint ranges, I explain more about this in my review here.
All “one coat” paints on a single chart
For those who prefer to have all colours in a single comparison sheet, I compiled all of the paint swatches above into a super high-res graphic. It’s sorted by colour families – so all yellows in a row, all oranges, all warm reds, all cool reds, and so on. This makes comparing colours from various brands even more easy. As a bonus, you get all of the single swatches above in their full, original resolution in an uncompressed image quality:
This hand-painted swatch is available in my Patreon shop for a small donation (or by becoming an Autarch tier member). I also have swatches for Citadel, Vallejo Game and Model Color, Warpaints Fanatic, AK 3rd Gen and more – all cross-compatible with each other so you can compare colours across different brands. Check out my shop for details.
Stahly’s favourite “one coat” paint range
Question remains, which is my favourite range of all? I’d say I still use Contrast the most, as they are richly pigmented and have a good selection of colours. I wasn’t a fan of the original Speedpaints’ reactivation, but now that the 2.0 formula made the paints more stable, I found I use them more often, as the range offers a lot of choice. Xpress Colors’ slightly lower pigmentation limits their use a little bit, but they have some nice colours and work well in combination with preshading, for example Slapchop or a zenithal basecoat. Dipping Inks are cheap, but somewhat inconsistent. Instant Colors are the most different from all the others as they use a high amount of opaque pigment. You can create some nice effects with them but I’ll only use them rarely.
If I’d have to make a tier list of all “one coat” paints currently on the market, it would look like this:
I hope this post can be a valuable resource to you, so let me know in the comments if this was helpful, and/or leave a reaction below. Also, find us on our Discord server if you want to discuss Contrast and “one coat” paints. Thanks for reading, and happy hobbying!
Wow! This is insanely useful (and was probably a lot of work). Thanks.
One idea to improve in future updates: Maybe you could embrace the slop chop trend and do the comparison not only on white primed surfaces, but on black primed and dry brushed as well ( kinda like a German dude did here for a few colours of the xpress range: http://www.miniaturicum.de/service/xpres_colors_overview.pdf )
Great suggestion! Give me a few months, I put it on my to do list 🙂
Very useful, will you be continuing the series with the new Vallejo’s new xpress expansion ?
Yeah, coming soon!
Did you find any issues with cracking and pulling back with the GSW dipping inks? I have all of the first wave, and with some of the colours, I find you have to be very sparing with the applications – if you let it pool, you are guaranteed to have it pull back, crack and a lovely primer show through. I use them less and less for this reason.
Yes, I have that on a few colours of the first wave as well. Second wave is fine though. Try to soak up the paint with a clean brush where too much ink gathers, this will help to reduce the effect.
An all-stars team sort of follow up video with the very best of all the ranges for each colour would be cool 🙂 GSW have some better ones out now thankfully too like opulent red (much better than the cloak one)
Yeah, great idea. Not so easy though. I’ll wait for the new Speedpaints and then I’ll try to come up with something!
would it be possible to create an image with comparison of colour by colour like you did for speedpaints versus contrast paints? That way I can choose which color I want from which company 🙂
That’s a great idea! I’ll do once I reviewed Vallejo’s Xpress Colors (and probably The Army Painter expanded Speedpaint range), so I can combine all one coat paints into a single large graphic. Until then you can download the Dipping Ink and Contrast graphics above and put them next to each other on your screen, as they’ve been photographed over the same coat of primer 🙂
any news? 🙂
Not yet, I’m waiting for the expanded Speedpaint range and 12 new Dipping Inks to make one comprehensive graphic 🙂
But will all the rest be blown out of the water by the Vallejo Xpress Colors ?
I‘ll try to find out as soon as possible!
Generally love those comparisons, and I do like a lot of the colours – but say for Army Painter something a little weird happened and I wonder if that’s application or just the properties of the paint?
Mh, can you specify what you mean?