Goonhammer Historicals: Reviewing The Army Painter Historicals British Paint Set

[Disclaimer: All three Historical paint sets were sent to me free of charge by The Army Painter]

Last time I took a look at the German Paint set put out by The Army Painter, summarised the contents, did a little painting and ended on my thoughts and opinions about the quality and execution of that paint set; this time I will somewhat spoil the ending by saying right from the get go: This is the best paint set out of the three - it is just plain amazing. Given that this set has been in my paint collection for a while, I have had ample time to put it to various use and its paints have seen the most use in my collection compared to the German and American set. That said, let me continue with my usual steps of review.

Credit: The Army Painter

The set comes with 20 paints like the other two sets. Just like them it shares the following paints:

Steel (Matches Gunmetal)
Rust
Black
White
Warm Skin Tone (Matches Warm Skin Shade)
Black Tone (Matches Dark Tone)
Brown Tone (Matches Strong Tone)
Military Shader (Matches Military Shader)
Rifle Brown

Credit: The Army Painter

Beyond those directly shared among the sets, you will also find the following paints, which are not exactly in each set, but are the same tone of colour:

Command Red (Matches Pure Red)

The rest of the paints are dedicated paints for British uniforms and equipment. Out of those nine paints there is one full triad of Dark, Mid and Light Battle Dress similar to the other two sets. These are as follows:

Light Battle Dress
Mid Battle Dress
Dark Battle Dress
Webbing Khaki
Mud Splatter
British Camo Green
Webbing Green
Fair Skin
Beret Maroon
Commando Green (Matches Scarab Green)

Again the Battle Dress triad is a given, it works decently well for British uniforms and you can modulate the brightness by increasing or decreasing the light and dark paints. The Beret Maroon and Commando Green make it possible to fully paint both Airborne and Commandos. You also have two paints for the two common types of Webbing which are pretty decent matches.

The Camo Green when combined with Mud Splatter and the standard Battle Dress even allows you to paint camo jackets. I have to mention again, I do not understand why they had to include that Rust paint as it seems very out of place on an infantry paint set.

Painting British Infantry

Having learned my lesson from the review of the German set I went with the provided video tutorial straight away. That is not to say it is the de facto way to use this set and it only focuses on painting the British army, leaving out Commandos and Airborne; But I do feel getting a rundown on how it was intended to be used might make for a more well grounded review. Considering The Army Painter is a beginner brand of paints, I would assume any beginner to make use of provided painting guides to learn. So matching that experience seems logical.

Credit: Momma Negan

The video tutorial uses a British soldier in summer uniform, but since I did not have any I decided to use the new winter Brits (Disclaimer: I was sent this kit for free by Warlord Games). This went surprisingly well, I only really needed to figure out a recipe for the vest and scarf on this guy; luckily the Commando Green and Rifle Brown are perfect colours for that purpose.

Credit: Momma Negan

I have to admit, similar to the German painting guide, this worked incredibly well for getting a decent paintjob in a short amount of time. I think this proves my assumption correct that these sets are very purpose built. That is not to say you cannot deviate or experiment; As I mentioned earlier, the painting guide did not account for the red brown vest, yet the paints provided in this set worked incredibly well to capture the right shade of colour. Beyond all of the praise, I do feel it prudent to mention some hiccups: for one, the Light Battle Dress comes out of the bottle rather thick and has the same issue I mentioned in the German review - namely the grainy look left when glazing without Warpaints Stabilizer, you can see it on the model as especially the highest points do not have a consistent look to them.

I did not encounter this issue with any of the other paints, not even the Webbing Khaki which I would have suspected to show similar issues. The other issue relates to the choice of skin colour chosen for this set; I personally find the paint to be way too bright to be easily worked with. The brightness also brings with it an issue of low opacity which requires more than two coats to fully cover. I ended up making it work by basecoating with a mix of Command Red and Fair Skin which has a higher opacity and then worked towards pure Fair Skin. That should cover all of the relevant thoughts on painting by the tutorial, yet there still is...

An Alternative!

Similar to my review of the German paint set, I wanted to test the versatility of this paint set. Namely if you can use it to paint other nations, especially the minor ones unlikely to get any paint sets. Since I have had this set since around Summer last year, you may have already seen my work on other nations with this paint set. Specifically I used it in my HTPE articles during our Summer at the Eastern Front last year. The first nation I tried to use this set for, was the Kingdom of Romania:

Romanian Vânători de munte. Credit MommaNegan

The paints in this set were a fantastic match for the brownish khaki tone of Romanian uniforms. I ended up formulating two recipes for a darker and lighter uniform to mix and match on pants, jackets and long coats. The results convinced me to actually make them my primary paint scheme for my Romanian forces moving forward.

Romanian Tank Hunter in Winter Uniform. Credit: Momma Negan

If you are a Romanian player too and want to learn how to paint this colour scheme, you can check out the HTPE I wrote on it.

The other nation that works decently well with this paint set is the Kingdom of Hungary. While I did not fully paint them using just the paints from this set, the paints were still integral and I feel confident, that you can easily swap in some paints from this set for the non-AP ones I used.

Credit: MommaNegan

While you may need a few more paints not in this set to properly paint this nation, it still shows the versatility of this set. Funnily enough some of the additional paints include the Drab triad from the American paint set (for the helmets). However, unlike the Kingdom of Romania you will need completely different paints for uniforms that include camouflage and those that are drab green. If you want to learn how to paint those, again there is a handy HTPE article.

Final Thoughts

As I mentioned at the beginning, I think this is one of the best paint sets out of the three currently available. Not only do the paints in it visibly match the most common colours on a British Soldier; the fact that khaki brown was a very common uniform colour in WW2 also makes this set relatively versatile to take on other nations such as Romania, Hungary, maybe even France with some experimenting.

Some issues still remain and have been remarked upon already, but neither of which is necessarily a deal breaker. The issue of the grainy white pigments in the Light Battle Dress can be somewhat mitigated by using Warpaints Stabilizer to thin the paint, rather than water; Meanwhile the issue with the paint selection, namely the Rust paint, can be ignored if this is your starting point for historical painting as you will need Rust at some point for Tanks. Otherwise you could always buy the paints as singles directly from The Army Painter, since the box itself does not come with any meaningful savings.

If you have read my review for the German paint set, some of what I have said will sound familiar. I feel that I have already expressed a lot of my thoughts on the Historical paint series as a whole in that article already. I will therefore reiterate this: I think the Historical series is a great project and will hopefully make the historical tabletop hobby more accessible to people; I like what they have done so far and having seen what is coming next I am looking forward to where they will go.

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Tags: historicals | Army Painter | ww2 | british | world war ii