I can’t believe how long it’s been since I got round to posting on here. Over a year. Ouch.

It’s been a long year. A total change of career – quitting teaching after 23 years – and a  severe reduction in wages. I haven’t forgotten about wargaming or painting. I’ve still been painting a few things, and building lots of miniatures. I wrote a backlog of all the things I need to photo/blog and the list went on and on…

So, I thought I’d kick this year’s first post off with a rant.

Once upon a time, I had a large army of Orcs and Goblins for Warhammer Fantasy. I started painting them up as carefully (but speedily) as I could using a combo of GW Goblin Green paint and GW’s Green Ink. About a quarter of the way into painting them, GW discontinued the Green Ink. The replacement washes were nothing like the same colour, so my army went on the back burner. Damn them.

I’d also got used to painting with a colour called Mechrite Red. That also got discontinued by GW and replaced with the “equivalent” colour Mephiston Red. Well, I’m sure you can tell from the pic below, they are far from the same… (pic not mine)

The new Red is actually really good – In fact I was using the Mephiston Red Spray paint GW made to base paint my Gates of Antares Algoryn forces. That is, until – you guessed it – GW discontinued the spray.

You’d think I’d have learnt my lesson, but GW released a texture paint called Agrellan Earth. It’s basically a crackle paint that you paste on quite thick and it dries like dried earth. It’s pretty good stuff. I’d started using it on a lot of my Antares game bases. Not for the entire base, just some on a few bases to show the dried out land the models were stood on.

Anyway, my small pot of Agrellan Earth is about used up. So I went to GW’s website to order some more. There were 2 options, Agrellan Earth and Agrellan Badlands. Apparently the Badlands version dries in larger patches. Anyway, the good news for me was that they came in the new larger pots. Great. A tub of the Agrellan Earth will last me ages. I should have known.

Here’s the old pot on the left, and the new one on the right. They are most definately not the same colour.

I painted them onto a brown undercoated base to see the real difference…

As you can see, a massive colour difference. So, I decided to give them a few hours to dry, to see the crackle effect. I hoped that maybe drying out gave similar colours.

Nope. Nothing alike.

So much for adding some quick cool effects to the bases of my Antares armies. Yet again, Games Workshop changing colours, or discontinuing colours has wrecked my painting mid-way through an army.

From now on, I’ll be sticking with Army Painter and Vallejo all the way. A great deal of my paint collection is by them, and a dripper bottle is far better than the awful pots GW make – now those pots alone would make a whole rant post.

I’ll post some pics of minis soon…

EDIT – 22nd June 2019

I wrote an email to GW showing the colour difference. By the time I saw the email reply from them, they’d already sent another large pot free of charge through the post. Although I have my qualms with GW, their customer service is still really good.

Anyway, in the mean time, I’d bought large pots of cheap Saffron and Vanilla Crackle Paint from eBay. Although £5.65 per pot (inc postage) isn’t exactly cheap, they’re 50ml instead of GW’s 24ml.

Mixing the Saffron with the new GW Agrellan Earth in a roughly 50/50 batch gave a very similar colour to the old Agrellan Earth. As both paints are crackle paints, the mix didn’t  ‘water down’ the crackling effect. The tubs are also ‘squirty/dripper’ types making it way easier to use than the GW pot.

Problem solved – and with enough crackle paint to mix do multiple armies now. 🙂