'Eavy Metal Citadel Edge Paint Set review

WHAT'S INSIDE

For 46 € (or 35 £, or 58 $) you get a nice black box that hold 9 Edge colours inside the usual 12ml paint pots, an 'Eavy Metal Detail Brush and a little, twelve pages long, colour booklet

The booklet show us six ways we could use the colours, like painting gems, doing hard edge highlights on Space Marines or Dark Eldar armour but like the recent "paint tutorials" found in White Dwarfs they just don't go in too much details of how things are really done

THE COLOURS

The first thing you notice when you look at the colours is that they are very desaturated and light (as you could expect from colours designed to be the last highlight on your models). They are almost pastel-like

Flayed One Flesh : a bit sandy, but with some red in there

Dorn Yellow : I was expecting some sort of light cream colour but it's more yellowish than that, like lemon cream I could say ...

Krieg Khaki : a light olive / drab green

Gauss Blaster Green : is very similar to Vallejo Foul Green, a very light green, but more desaturated

Blue Horror : a very light blue / grey

Baharroth Blue : this is basically teal. My first impression was of a lighter hawk turquoise

Dechala Lilac : lilac, pure and simple

Fulgrin Pink : a nice pink, with a bit of lilac / purple mixed in

Lugganath Orange : do you know those big pieces of salmon found in supermarkets?

THE BRUSH

The 'Eavy Metal Detail Brush is a Kolinsky sable brush with a good tip, a small belly and it has good snap (the hairs return in positions after being bent). It's not the best brush in the world but it sure is much better than the standard Citadel brushes.

White the tip is good, it's not as good as a fine Kolinsky sable brush can be and for what we pay this brush (more on this later) we should except the best sable...

I took a picture of the Detail Brush together with a Winsor & Newton Series 7 (a size 0). The Detail Brush is the short one:

As you can see, the tip of the Detail Brush is good but not as fine as the Series 7 one. And keep in mind that this it's not a brand new brush like the 'Eavy Metal one

Also, the belly of the brush (the section between the metal corona of the brush and the very tip, this is where the brush "hold" the paint) is smaller: this could be fine but for much less money you could buy yourself a Serie 7 Miniature (shown on the right in the next picture) that sport a belly just a little smaller than the Detail Brush and the same nice tip of it's big brother:

THE TEST

The first thing I did was to put the colours in action on little piece of white paper to see what they really look like: I just picked up a bit of colour form the pot with a wet brush and painted it on the paper

Dorn Yellow is a very nice lemon-yellow indeed but I really can't say how much I like Gauss Blaster Green

Blue Horror will probably make many Space Wolves howl at the moon while I'm seriously thinking to use Baharroth Blue and Dechala Lilac for my Dark Eldar.

Fulgrin Pink is ... pink, but I really don't know what to say about Lugganath Orange.

To make a comparison with the Layers line of colours I tested out in the same fashion also Temple Guard Blue:

It's more opaque and more saturated than, say, Baharroth blue and it was much thicker also


The second test I made was to use the paints as glazes by thinning them with more water then in the previous test:

I used the same quantity of water for all the paints: around 3 parts of water and 1 part of paint for the first step (the big puddles in front of the respective paint pot) and adding two more "parts" of water in the next step (the more translucent layers)

IS IT WORTH IT?

Let's do some math here

This kit come at 46 € while a single paint pot is 3 €. This mean that we pay as high as 19 € for the brush.

Here in Italy I could buy a Winsor and Newton Serie 7 for around 8 € so no, the kit in itself is not worth it.

Would I suggest to buy one or two pots if they get released individually? I would say yes they would add some interesting colours to ours palettes


UPDATE: THE PAINTS ON THE FIELD!

I recently used some of the Edge paints to do the last hightlights on my Eldar Wraithknight. You can see here the completed model.

Here is a list of the colors I've used:

• Baharroth Blue: highlights on the blue areas. The teal / torquoise add a nice hard edge to the azure of the previous highlight
• Blue Horror: the black areas you see on the model are painted in a very dark grey and highlighted progressively with greish blues so Blue Horror was the perfect final stage for those areas
• Dorn Yellow: highlight on the yellow areas
• Gauss Blaster Green: highlights on the green base