Color Samples for GW Contrast Paints and Army Painter SpeedPaints

Recently I purchased the 'Mega Set' of Army Painter SpeedPaints. These are augmenting, and for some colors, replacing my existing collection of GW Contrast Paints. For me the two products are fairly similar in their role in my paint collection for painting historical miniatures. They each have their pros and cons, but for me they're pretty much equivalent so really the tones and shades dictated which brand to keep in my collection.

As you can see in the first photo, I prefer to apply an actual paint swatch on the cap of each bottle to give me a better idea of exactly which color I'm grabbing from my collection. As you can imagine, my collection of various shades of olive green and military greys is extensive, so this is an essential time saver and prevents many paint selection mistakes. With Contrast and SpeedPaint, there is a shading effect that isn't well represented using this method. Instead I primed craft skull beads with white primer and glued each skull onto the cap of the paint. 

I then painted the skull with the paint allowing it to "do its thing" and shade the skull. I think the value of this is apparent in the photos.  

This second photo is the full SpeedPaint 'Mega Set' from Army Painter. The colors are vibrant and with the exception of the 'Holy White' color none have any solid white pigment in them, so they mix with each other well to make other colors nicely. In general they seem to be more heavily pigmented than the GW Contrast paints, which means the included SpeedPaint medium is even more useful in creating less saturated tones of the same color, all the way down to making color shaded washes with these.

Here are the colors from the GW Contrast paint line that I kept. Note that I re-potted these into dropper bottles instead of the awful GW paint pots. I did this before I came up with the skull color sample idea, but since they were in pots already, adding the skulls wasn't hard. I have seen people use the skull idea on the GW pots after I posted the idea to the GW Contrast Paint Facebook group. 

Of the GW paints I chose to keep all of the fleshes and browns, both turquoises, 'Voluptuous Pink' and 'Apothecary White'. The latter being just a shade lighter than the Army Painter equivalent. I might use both depending on the situation. Of particular note, the 'Gore-Grunta Fur' red brown is fantastic for ginger hair and some horses, and without mixing, there's not a good substitute in the Army Painter line.