In Which I Start Painting My Night Lords Finally! But Then Realise That Vallejo Paint Just Isn't Going to Cut It!

With the name of this blog being 'Fifty Shades of Night', and what with it having a large (if crudely drawn) Night Lords emblem at the top, you might be forgiven for wondering why I haven't actually mentioned any Night Lords yet!  Well wonder no more, because I finally started painting them - now I've completed the Ravenwing Sgt, my next little project is the Chaos Chosen Champion 'Draznicht' from the Dark Vengeance boxed set.  This guy is going to be a test for my Night Lords colour scheme - which I thought I had worked out.  It was going to be based around a black undercoat, followed by the Vallejo Game Colour shade 'Night Blue':

Night Blue looked like the perfect shade - and it obviously comes in the Vallejo dropper bottle, which I love.  But my affair with Night Blue was short lived.  With the few Vallejo paints I own, I'd noticed that I tend to get quite a glossy finish - you can just about see this on the radar screen of the Ravenwing Sgt I posted last time if you're interested here.  A quick Google search showed me that I wasn't alone in having this problem, but also that the solution is simple (if quite annoying) - you just have to shake many Vallejo paints for quite a long time in order to get a matte finish.  No problem I thought - at least the bottle design saves me time and fuss, offsetting that a bit.  But when you've shaken a bottle for a couple of minutes - as I did with Night Blue - you'd probably expect it to be a very consistent shade.  This was not my experience here - my Chosen Champion currently has one leg which looks a much lighter blue than the other - even though both were painted within minutes of each other.  That's the first problem I found.  The second is that this paint chips easily!  Again, a quick Google search shows me that I'm not alone with this problem either.  To be fair, this problem might have been compounded by the fact that I basecoated the mini with Citadel/GW Imperial Primer (black), which is extremely easy to chip (unlike a spray undercoat).  But usually when I use Imperial Primer, I find that after a top coat has been applied, it's pretty resilient to chipping damage.  Night Blue does not give this effect at all - I can very easily remove paint with my fingernail, and around the model's feet, the paint has worn away a lot already.  This might not be a big issue - I usually varnish my models when they're finished anyway, but as I'm going to be painting a whole army of Night Lords, there's no way I want to put up with this from the main colour that I'm using - I would spend my life touching up scratches on half-finished minis.

Vallejo paints do have a lot going for them - as I've mentioned, I find the bottle design to be at least 1001% better than the Citadel/GW pots - and they're certainly much cheaper (as well as containing more paint).  I'm a massive fan of Vallejo's Acrylic Thinner Medium - as followers will know - so I'm certainly not biased against Vallejo, and I think it's good that GW don't have a total monopoly on painting supplies (especially because they're so cut-throat), but there's no way I can use this paint.  I'm looking around for a cheaper alternative, but I think I'm going to have to go with Citadel Kantor Blue as the solution to my problem.  One thing I might start doing with paints that I use regularly however, is to decant them into Vallejo dropper bottles.  Citadel should really start using these - especially at the extortionate prices that they charge.