The Army Painter Warpaints Fanatic: Which Paints You Actually Need First

Walk up to the paint rack in our Pennsylvania shop and you are looking at a wall of small bottles — well over two hundred of them in The Army Painter's Warpaints Fanatic line alone. It is a genuinely intimidating sight, and the most common question we get at the counter is some version of: which of these do I actually need?

The honest answer is: far fewer than the wall suggests. Here is how we talk people through it.

What Warpaints Fanatic is, and why it suits beginners

Warpaints Fanatic is The Army Painter's current acrylic range, sold in 18ml dropper bottles. The dropper matters more than it sounds like it should. Squeezing two drops onto a palette gives you control over how much paint you use and how much water you add, which is most of what separates a smooth coat from a chalky one. Pots that you dip a brush into make thinning a guessing game.

The other thing worth knowing is that the range is built around triads. Most colors ship with a lighter and darker sibling designed to sit next to each other, so shading and highlighting becomes a matter of picking the neighbor rather than mixing something new and hoping you can reproduce it three weeks later. You can buy those groupings pre-boxed — the Deep Greens Flexible Triad Plus+ is a good example of the format — or just buy the individual pots as you need them.

A first kit: about eight to ten bottles

If you are painting your first squad, kit, or board game insert, this is roughly where we point people:

• Matt Black and Matt White — you will reach for these constantly, for basecoats, for mixing, and for edge work.
• Two or three of your main scheme colors, whatever those are. Pure Red, Leafy Green, Deep Grey, and Ice Yellow are all popular starting points.
• One metallic. Plate Mail Metal covers most steel and iron; Gun Metal is the darker option; Greedy Gold handles trim.
• One or two washes. This is the single biggest step up in results per dollar spent. Strong Tone is the all-purpose brown, Dark Tone is the near-black for armor and metal, and Soft Tone is the gentler option for lighter schemes. Washes flow into recesses and do your shading for you.

Standard colors run right around five dollars a bottle; washes, metallics, and effects sit a few cents above that. So a genuinely usable starting kit lands in the neighborhood of forty to fifty dollars. If you would rather have someone else make the call, the Warpaints Fanatic: Starter Set does exactly this job in one box, and the Metallics Set and Washes Set are the sensible follow-ups once you know you are sticking with the hobby.

The bottles that are not really paint

A quiet section of the range is the mediums and utility bottles, and they solve problems that new painters usually blame on their own hands:

• Brush-On Primer — for when it is too humid or too cold to spray outdoors, which in Maryland is a real chunk of the calendar.
• Wash Medium — thins a wash without weakening its color, and lets you make a wash out of any paint you own.
• Warpaints Retarder — slows drying time. If your paint is going tacky on the brush mid-stroke, this is the fix.
• Warpaints Stabilizer — keeps a thinned mix from separating on the palette.
• Matt Varnish and Gloss Varnish — the step people skip. If a model is going to be handled during games, varnish is what keeps the paint on it.

Then there are the effects, which are pure fun and worth exactly one impulse purchase: the Glow colors for power weapons and screens, Fresh Rust and Verdigris for weathering, and Dry Blood if your models are having a bad day.

Tools and bases

The Army Painter's tool line is stocked alongside the paint, and a few pieces punch above their price. A Wet Palette keeps thinned paint workable for hours instead of minutes. Mixing Balls dropped into your bottles make shaking actually work. The Hobby Starter Brush Set (2025) is a reasonable first set of brushes, and the Masterclass Drybrush Set is the upgrade once drybrushing becomes part of your routine. For assembly, the Precision Side Cutter and Plastic Frame Cutter both do clean work on sprues.

Bases are the fastest way to make a finished model look finished. The Battlefields Basing Set is the one-box answer, or pick up a single texture like Brown Battleground, Steppe Grass, or Snow, plus a tuft or two — Woodland, Wasteland, and Swamp get used the most around here — and you are done in ten minutes.

Where to find it

The full range lives at The Army Painter collection, and we ship nationwide. If you are local the Lemoyne store in Pennsylvania — or order online for pick-up in Maryland. Bring the model you are stuck on. Matching a color in person beats guessing from a screen every time, and we would rather talk you out of a bottle you do not need than sell you twelve you will never open.