ToP Tip: Visual comparison of all 61 Contrast, 89 Speedpaints, 59 Xpress Colors & 36 Dipping Inks

In this updated post, you will find all my hand-painted and professionally photographed paint swatches for all 61 old & new Citadel Contrast paints, all 89 Speedpaints 2.0 by The Army Painter, 24 Dipping Inks by Green Stuff World, and now also all 59 Xpress Colors from Vallejo. This should make it easy to find the perfect “one coat” colour for your next project.

I heard you all love bunches of plasticard filled with a variety of coloured squares, so here they are. All four comparison sheets shown were painted under the same conditions on white primed plasticard and professionally photographed under neutral 5500K light. Thus all colour swatches are comparable with each other. You can find out how I do my colour sheets in this post.

Comparison of all 61 old & new Contrast colours

I also made a video with more painted examples:

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 video:

Comparison of all 59 Vallejo Xpress Colors

Vallejo took a while to enter the one coat 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, a direct comparison to their Citadel counterparts can be found in this video:

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). Green Stuff World also changed the graphics on their website for hand-painted examples which should match their real-life appearance better.

I also made a comparison video of the original 24 colours with a few more thoughts about Dipping Inks, check it out here:

All “one coat” paints on a single chart

For those that prefer to have a single paint swatch, I compiled all of the paint swatches above into a single super high-res graphic. It’s sorted by colours so you can compare various brands even more easily. As the file size is over 12 Mb, it’s too big to share here. That’s why you can find the graphic (as well as many exclusive masterclass PDF tutorials and other hobby guides) on my Patreon for a small donation. I also made a similar chart but for all acrylic washes and Citadel Shade paints.

All of my “one coat” paint reviews:

If you want to learn more about the features and differences of the individual paint ranges, I recommend you read my detailed reviews:

• The 25 new Citadel Contrast Colours reviewed
• The Army Painter Speedpaint 2.0 review
• Green Stuff World Dipping Inks review
• Vallejo Xpress Color review (review of wave 2 and their Intense paints here)

I have also reviewed the Instant Colors from Scale 75, although I have not yet created a comparison chart for them:

• Instant Colors review

Stahly’s favourite “one coat” range

Question remains, which is my favourite range of all? I’d say I still prefer Contrast, as they are the most richly pigmented paints, 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 really nice colours and work well in combination with preshading, for example Slapchop or a zenithal basecoat. Instant Colors are the most different from all the others as they use opaque pigments, 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!