ToP Tip: Visual comparison of all Citadel Contrast, Speedpaint 2.0, Xpress Color, Dipping Inks, and Instant Color paints

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!