Army Painter Mega Set - finally arrived!

The postie almost thumped the door down at Nerd Towers this morning, with a boxed set of the Army Painter Mega Set from www.ibuywargames.co.uk
There'd been a delay in posting - through no fault of the sender - and the customer service from ibuywargames.co.uk was fantastic. We feel it's important to support local, independent businesses, and where businesses remember to treat the customers like people, we like to shout about it. We're already looking forward to doing business again with Ian from www.ibuywargames.co.uk

But for now, we've got a brand new, shiny boxed set of paints to play with.
It's the "older" Mega Set (Army Painter are releasing a new set for September 2013 with a few more colours and a range of seven different inks/washes) but Ian did us a really good deal, and with an extra 10% off his advertised price, we got the set for about two-thirds of the RRP.

We went for this set because of the dropper style bottles, which should allow us to dispense the right amount of paint, accurately, for mixing colours. With this in mind, we're hoping the days of buying up every shade of green, for example, are over! The reviews of the paint set are also very positive, with reviewers comparing them favourably with some of the more popular, "better" brands.

So what's in the box?

There's a painting guide, six different sized brushes and six boxes of paints. Each box of paints has a range of similar colours:

there's a box of blue-y, grey colours

a box of green-y yellows

a box of browns and flesh colours, and so on....

We've not had time to try the actual paints out yet, but they all look a nice consistency when dispensed onto a white ceramic mixing palette (ok, a small dining plate). At first glance, the Uniform Grey paint matches the Uniform Grey primer perfectly (that's a big selling point of this range of paints) and painting a pale colour over a grey primer gives a very good finish after two coats (you might get away with one coat, as the coverage is very good, but the second coat really makes the colour nice and vibrant).

Also included in the set are water-based versions of the Quickshade in three tones - soft, strong and dark. We'll give these a go this evening, and compare the finishes with the tin of Quickshade we just bought and see how they match up. Having already dropped (and chipped the paint off) one of our miniatures, the idea of a varnish-based stain (rather than ink) is quite appealing - so we'll see how the two compare, later on tonight.