Glossary
Contrast or speed paints
One-coat paints that both color and shade a miniature at once when applied over a light or textured primer.
Contrast and speed paints are thin, translucent formulas designed to be applied in a single coat over a light colored primer, usually white or grey with a zenithal light coat on top. As the paint dries, it naturally pools darker in recesses and thins out to a lighter tone on raised areas, doing much of the work of a basecoat and a wash in one step.
These paints matter because they dramatically cut painting time for large armies or batch projects, a technique that used to take basecoating, washing and highlighting can sometimes be reduced to one or two coats. They still work best paired with some traditional techniques, a thin drybrush or edge highlight on top of a contrast coat adds the extra pop that the paint alone does not fully provide.
Because they rely on the primer underneath to create shading, applying them over a flat, unprimed color or over the wrong base tone gives muddy, uneven results. A frequent mistake is treating them like a normal basecoat and applying two or three thick coats, which fills in the recesses they are designed to pool into and removes the automatic shading effect entirely.