The Paint Review – (Don’t Fear) the Reaper Master Series

As a company, Reaper are something of a fixture in the miniature painting and tabletop RPG space, producing an enormous range and quantity of high quality metal figures and budget plastic figures well loved by hobby painters and D&D enthusiasts. Some of the first figures I painted were from the Bones line, in fact. The Master Series (and Bones series, which as far as I can tell are the old Master Series HD paints with a different label) have been around for a good long while.

Reaper kindly sent me the Reaper MSP Starter Set and the MSP Bones Ultra-Coverage Paints: Set #1 to test for this review. 

Reaper boasts that their paints have excellent coverage, smoothness, pigmentation et cetera; the same things every paint company says about their paints. But in Reaper’s case, do they?

Let’s start with coverage. As you can see I made myself a little opacity chart for the Reaper paints that I have, and in the main, barring the colours you would expect to struggle when opacity is the question (Yellow, Orange, Spring-Green, white), the coverage really is excellent, not quite a one-coat coverage but certainly very close, the darker greens, the blues (although I only had two blues to test, they came out nicely) went over the black and white parts of the chart both with ease, and so I’m pretty happy calling the coverage of the range in general excellent, certainly more even and stronger than the general baseline of Citadel’s base paint. 

Let’s talk variety. I got a 24 paint sampler, so I can’t really judge the amount of variety spread across the whole range from a personal perspective, but from my contact in the company, Reaper sells somewhere in the region of 550 different colours. That is bananas levels of variety, of the major hobby paint manufacturers, only Vallejo really comes close to just how many different colours they sell. Reaper even has a utility on their website where you can upload an image and it’ll match the tone you choose in the picture with one of their paints. Bonkers. The Core Colours range are also grouped into triads for ease-of-use, which beginners will certainly appreciate. In terms of sheer variety, Reaper is unquestionably S-Tier.

And so on to the question of smoothness. The Reaper rep I spoke to averred that the Master Series Paints can be used straight from the bottle without any thinning. Of course, having been raised on the ancient mantra “thin your paints” I was relatively sceptical and dubious about this claim, but I’m nothing if not a consummate professional – so I gave it a go, blobbing a bit of MSP onto the top of my desk (who needs a palette anyway) and daubing it onto the old Empire Handgunner model who volunteered himself as a test subject. The result? Well, yeah, pretty much, if you want to use these paints without thinning them you certainly can, without gumming up the detail too much and leaving hideous brush marks. I was quite surprised by how easily the paint self-levelled as it dried; kudos to you, Reaper. That’s not to say that you can’t thin these paints; you absolutely are able to take them down to a wash consistency without splitting them, and the MSP Flow Improver is another useful tool to have, should you want to thin without altering the characteristics as much as water would. Very interesting! 

So the verdict for smoothness is, I’d say, very good.

Next up on the paint review docket: pigmentation or the strength/saturation of the colours.

Reaper says that their MSPs are Highly Pigmented; are they? The answer to that is unequivocally yes. The pigmentation is very dense and the colours are strong – this is especially important when it comes to how mixable the paints are; you can’t really add saturation by mixing, and so using the strongest paints you can get at the start is the best when mixing. There’s not a huge amount more to say about this; obviously as they aren’t mono-pigmented paints they’re not going to be as incredibly, overwhelmingly, eye-bleedingly strong, but as far as general purpose miniature paints these are probably some of the strongest/most pigmented you’re going to find, in my opinion.

The pigmentation of MSPs is very good.

The bottles are dropper style and typically work well. I’ve had a few clogged nozzles that I had to clear with a toothpick, but that’s fairly normal across all dropper bottle types. Fish swim, birds fly, dropper bottles get clogged.. It’s nothing with which to ding Reaper specifically, just something to be aware of. Each bottle is also preinstalled with glass beads for agitation and ensuring that the paints are properly mixed, which is a nice touch.

One thing I struggle to get my head around as far as Reaper are concerned is the packaging of their paint sets. As previously mentioned I got the Starter and Bones 1 sets and was quite surprised to see they each turned up in a pretty chunky ABS plastic flight case thingy, both of which were about 2x as big as the amount of paints inside. This felt very excessive considering (and maybe this is a strange thing for a paint reviewer to say, but) they’re just bottles of paint. Nice paint to be sure, but every other paint brand manages just fine with a cardboard box, which makes me wonder how much more expensive shipping is expensive for a bulkier, heavier case. Perhaps the notion is that you can buy a paint set and then fill the empty slots with bottles you purchase separately and more easily carry your paints if you want to paint somewhere other than your normal station? None of this really has any bearing on the quality of the paint itself, but with the paint sets, but it confused me enough to warrant mentioning here. 

Another little niggle with Reaper paints in general is that they’re not that readily available in European hobby shops when compared to the big dogs like Citadel, Vallejo , Army Painter etc. Their presence on shelves where I live is essentially zero, and if you buy online they’re going to ship from the UK, which is absolutely going to fuck you up when the customs man takes his cut (where I live, packages from the UK can be subject to a levy of anywhere from 25% to 100% of the value of the item) the EU is protectionist in the extreme and since Brexit happened, well… Yeah. So European buyers be forewarned, if you want to dance with the Reaper, you might end up paying quite a lot more than just the label price, although, ironically – the label price in Euro is actually lower than the price in Pounds sterling. 

Which brings us neatly onto the last thing we’ll talk about: Price, how many of your hard earned simoleons do you need to drop to get a taste of these, admittedly very very good, paints? Well, one bottle of reaper Master Series will set you back €3.75/$3.89/£3.89, and therefore in terms of price per litre, (the metric I’m going to use in all my paint reviews) Reaper Master Series ranks towards the top of the table, surpassed only by the expensive premium paints from Citadel and Duncan Rhodes. 

So where does that leave us? What’s the final verdict on the Reaper Master Series (and Bones)? Well, I think I can confidently say that Reaper MSPs are exceptional, strong coverage, bright and saturated colour, incredibly smooth and just the right amount of viscous. I was genuinely surprised by how much I enjoy using them, not because I thought they would be bad (I didn’t) but because they’re so different to everything else I’m used to. Sure, they have their quirks (ABS flight case… why are you here?) but leaving those to one side, these paints are brilliant. If you have the opportunity to grab some and fancy giving them a spin, they are well worth a try. 

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