The Paint Review: TTCombat

Welcome, my friends! It is I, your prince of the pigment, come among you once again to bestow primordial philosophy passed on to me by the primarchs populating the pantheon of painting. 

Just kidding. It’s a paint review! You read the title already, didn’t you? You’re smart, everyone knows that. Today’s test subject in the lab (aka, my desk) is a selection of paints from the TTCombat range, specifically the 72 “core set” paints with which their range launched after the successful Kickstarter last year. Since then, their range has inflated to a pretty respectable 180 different paints, which, although it doesn’t come close to the vastness offered by Big Dogs Citadel and Vallejo (each with over 300 different paints in their ranges), it is nevertheless impressive for a brand that is so young. For those not in the know, TTCombat is a subsidiary of The Troll Trader, a Cornwall-based company that touts itself as “The world’s largest second-hand wargaming stockist”. 

The launch of the TTCombat Paint range marks an expansion into the realm of selling its own colours, and according to Troll Trader themselves, the TTCombat paint range is designed and produced by HMG Paints Ltd – the UK’s leading paint manufacturer, this ain’t some blokes-in-a-shed mixing a paint bucket with a stick operation, oh no, these are serious paints made by the same company that also makes Coat d’Arms, P3, Warcolours and their Nostalgia ‘94 line, and, until the mid-2000s, made Games Workshop’s very own Citadel range. 

Thank you very much to TTCombat for sending along a copy of their Kickstarter Core Set for review.

That’s enough preamble pertaining to their pedigree, what are the TTCombat paints like? How do they handle? On that I’m pleased to say that the verdict is a positive one, the general consistency is creamy and smooth with dense pigmentation – by my estimation, similar to that of a Citadel base paint. The paints themselves have decently saturated, in the core set I received there are some particularly bold, strong reds, oranges, blues, and greens. You can always remove saturation from paint by mixing with grey, but you can never add saturation, so having the most saturation you can from the jump is a must if you’re planning to mix, and in the mixing department these paints don’t disappoint, they mix nicely with both other TTCombat paints and paints from other ranges, in this regard, the heavily pigmented nature of the paints really helps.
Of the paints I’ve got, the blues from TTCombat are absolutely phenomenal, I don’t think I have any other blues as strong and rich as these. 

The colour selection in the Core Set is pretty decent in the main, with a broad array of hues on display, in particular I’m impressed by the diversity of the skin tones, something that a lot of traditional manufacturers have struggled to get right in the past. The naming scheme is also not too bad, pretty much each colour name has the name of the actual colour in them, which, having been irritated for years by Citadel’s often opaque and inconsistent nomenclature. (Bugman’s Glow, I’m looking at you. Cadian Fleshtone, but Kislev Flesh? Why? Army Painter has Barren Yellow, Desert Yellow, and then Yellow Dune, why? Why?!) I appreciate the clarity and common sense.

The TTCombat range boasts a fair few washes too and honestly, I’ve only a small complaint – the black wash dries very glossy despite shaking an arm-cramping seven shades out of the bottle. The others seem ok so it’s entirely possible that I just got a duff bottle, but even so, I thought I ought to mention it. They’re very mobile, flowing nicely into the recesses with very little effort, but the working time is pretty slender, if you’re not really on-the-ball with these things, you’re going to get some annoying tidemarks. Compared to, say, Citadel shades, these are more involved and less of a “slather and leave” solution to shading. 

One thing to note is that the TTCombat washes stain a bit more than those of their competitors in my experience, somewhere between a Citadel wash and a Contrast paint. To be sure, this is not always a bad thing, but it’s worth being aware of if you decide to use them. 

So far so good, but it’s not all sunshine and rainbows, for example: the packaging is occasionally very frustrating. The bottles themselves are equipped with droppers, but the nozzles are so narrow and so long, and the paints so thick that clogs are almost guaranteed, a tap on the desk is pretty much enough to knock them loose and get the paint moving again, but I’d take the wider, shorter nozzles of the other major brands any time over these.

The website, in something of an admirable display of honesty, says that these paints are not airbrush ready, and that’s a summary with which I find myself concurring. Over the time I tried to airbrush with these paints I had an inordinate amount of both tip dry and clogging. Now, this is not my first rodeo, I wasn’t squeezing these paints out of the bottle into my paint cup, I thinned the paints as I would any other paint that goes through my airbrush, but alas to no avail. TTCombat sells an airbrush thinner formulated for their paints, but since I didn’t have any I’m unable to fairly comment on whether it helps with these problems. If you’ve got your eye on these paints with airbrushing in mind I’d think again, or at the very least have their (admittedly very inexpensive) thinner on hand if you decide to go for it. Fair warning! 

My other quibbles are far more minor than the issue of nozzle clogging and airbrush unsuitability – for one, the bottles aren’t equipped with pre-installed agitators. Now, obviously this isn’t a dealbreaker, certainly not all paint brands include agitators as standard, but compared to what I estimate to be their closest market competitors, Army Painter Fanatic, it’s a shame that these bottles don’t include them. 

Additionally, the paint bottles are equipped with childproof tops and neck rings which will probably be quite annoying for new users, it didn’t take me long before I was pushing-and-twisting the bottle tops by habit, but even so, it’s a strange choice and makes me wonder what the impetus behind it was – eyedrop bottles bought from a wholesale medical suppliers, perhaps?

The price per unit is roughly the same as a pot of Citadel paint but each bottle contains 17ml compared to the 12ml of the Citadel paint, making them considerably better value for money on a price-per-volume basis, comparing very favourably to ranges like AP Fanatic and Vallejo Game Colour.

All in all, the TTCombat paints have a lot to offer both the novice and experienced painter, they’re richly pigmented, smooth as butter, and dry to a nice matte finish. An exceptionally solid offering (albeit with some quirks) in the inexpensive end of the price-bracket. I think that if you give these a go you’ll be very pleased with them, and I really look forward to seeing how this range develops.

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